| Kim Byung-hak, co-CEO of Kakao Brain / Courtesy of Kakao Brain |
Kakao Brain said Monday that the company will be run by two CEOs, as the artificial intelligence (AI) arm of Kakao appointed its AI taskforce team leader Kim Byung-hak as CEO who will work with incumbent CEO Kim Il-doo.
The company said it held a shareholders meeting to name Kim as co-CEO in a bid to develop hyperscale AI language and vertical AI service models.
The new CEO has over 20 years of research experience in the AI search sector. From 2013 to 2017, he was the head of Kakao's applied analytics taskforce team, search team and recommendation team. Since February 2017, he has led Kakao's AI division, and since last April he has been leading the AI taskforce team.
Starting with this structural change, Kakao will combine its all AI capabilities into Kakao Brain. The incumbent CEO will continue to lead the global pioneering research and hyperscale AI model building business that Kakao Brain has been conducting.
The new CEO, who has experience in building successful business models, will be responsible for adding vertical service discovery using appropriate technologies in the area of multimodal language models and existing AI model fine-tuning business. Multimodal is an AI technology that has the ability to integrate, analyze and understand different data types such as images, text and audio.
“By adding vertical service capabilities to Kakao Brain, we want to create a new business model that has never existed before,” CEO Kim Byung-hak said. “We will do our best to establish ourselves as one of the major players in the diversified global AI market.”
“Kakao Brain has been conducting advanced AI research since 2017 and has been working on increasing Kakao's AI capabilities,” CEO Kim Il-doo said. “Together with the new CEO Kim Byung-hak, we will work on the direction of Kakao Brain's development.”