EST Aid (239340), an artificial intelligence portal and content company, has fully applied the national AI model "K-EXAONE" to AI search on its portal Zum. It marks the first commercial case of adopting a domestically developed model, created under the government-led "sovereign AI foundation model" project, across an entire portal search service.
EST Aid said Monday that it has replaced the core AI model behind Zum's "AI 1-Second Summary" and "AI Issue Trend" features with "K-EXAONE."
EST Aid began technical reviews for adopting "K-EXAONE" in the first quarter. It then partially applied the model and verified its stability in April, before expanding it to the entire search service this month.
"K-EXAONE" is a domestic model developed by LG AI Research under the Ministry of Science and ICT's sovereign AI foundation model project. EST Aid is part of the LG AI Research consortium.
EST Aid systematically linked its proprietary search engine, equipped with real-time information collection and curation functions, with K-EXAONE. By applying this to Zum, the company significantly improved Korean context suitability, including writing style and nuance, and achieved a roughly twofold reduction in operating costs compared with existing global models.
In particular, the company dramatically improved on "hallucination," the generation of information that differs from facts, which had been cited as a limitation of generative AI. By dividing the roles of the search engine and the large language model (LLM), the approach efficiently reflects the latest information regardless of when the AI model was trained and cross-verifies various sources to enhance the accuracy and reliability of information.
"AI, as a powerful technology, should not remain the exclusive domain of a few experts but should become a tool that guides everyone's daily lives in a better direction," EST Aid CEO Kim Nam-hyun said. "We will create an 'AI for everyone' environment where anyone can naturally experience domestic AI."
He added, "Going forward, we will expand Zum AI search into vertical domains such as shopping, finance and travel, evolving it into a 'vertical AI agent' service that reduces users' worries and time."
