Figurines with computers and smartphones are seen in front of the words "AI Artificial Intelligence," Feb. 19. Reuters-Yonhap

As tech companies fight to gain a foothold in the booming generative AI market, it's not just the U.S. and China that are fighting it out.

In South Korea, many companies are eyeing a role in the industry, from large companies like Samsung Electronics and Naver to local startups.

One of the most popular generative AI products that stood out in the country in 2023 was Wrtn, an AI service portal that provides various functions to users based on multiple large language models (LLMs) including OpenAI's GPT.

The founding team was made up of six young men from South Korea, with an average age of 24 when they set up the company in 2021.

Lee Dong-jae, born in 1996, was one of the founding members and chief strategy officer of Wrtn Technologies. He got to know other members while working as a volunteer for a nonprofit organization called Korea Scholar's Conference for Youth, founded by Wrtn's founder and CEO Lee Se-young.

When Lee Se-young decided to start an AI company in 2020, he approached some of the volunteers and asked for help. Lee Dong-jae, who halted his studies at the University of Southern California in 2018 and returned to Korea to start his own business, was one of them.

Lee Dong-jae, chief strategy officer of Wrtn Technologies / Courtesy of Wrtn Technologies

“We ended up landing on something called the foundation model,” Lee told The Korea Times last Thursday. “It was GPT2 at that time, and we thought this is gonna be a game changer.”

They applied for early access for the use of Clova, a foundation model developed by Korea's largest internet company Naver, and started off as a marketing tool, which helped users to generate marketing scripts and other writing materials.

But soon they realized such a tool was not enough. “In order to become a big startup, instead of just for focusing on this specific use case, we need to be able to provide multiple use cases with a single product,” Lee said. “We see an opportunity to become a local aggregator, or a local mega platform.”

When the company launched Wrtn last March and offered multiple AI services — including character chats and AI-generated profile photos — it immediately took off among Korean users. Within six months, the company saw its monthly active users (MAUs) reach 1 million, becoming one of the most popular generative AI products in Korea.

Two things that Wrtn did made it stand out. First, instead of pouring money into developing its own LLM, it decided to focus on creating a consumer-facing platform that combines the capabilities of multiple LLMs, including GPT4 by OpenAI and Claude by Anthropic.

Second, the company insists on providing AI services to users for free. One of the major reasons that Wrtn was able to achieve high user growth was the fact that it offered services based on GPT4 for free, which would otherwise require a fee on the ChatGPT official website.

Early users of Wrtn were similar to those of ChatGPT, which include marketers, developers and content creators. Now the platform has a higher percentage of students in their teens and 20s, who use Wrtn as a learning tool for middle and high school, according to Lee.

Wrtn provides generative AI services based on various LLMs. Screenshot from Wrtn's website

The company, located in southern Seoul's Gangnam District, now has around 100 employees with an average age of 30. The number of employees almost doubled from a year ago. Lee Se-young, the CEO, was selected by Forbes Korea this month for its list of 30 Under 30, a recognition of the most successful young entrepreneurs in the country.

Wrtn is an example of how Korean young people, seeing the picture of massive investment needed to invest in LLMs' development, are trying to find their own respective edge in the field by exploring their specialties or focusing on niche markets.

“Korean companies are really good at technical research. But the downside is when you start to require big money,” Lee said. “This industry is very capital-intensive, while Korean companies don't have as much access to capital as U.S. and China.”

The generative AI market in Korea is projected to reach $1.3 billion in 2024, which is much smaller than the $23.2 billion in the U.S., according to data from Statista. However, it is expected to grow continuously by 2030, with an annual growth rate of 22 percent.

The moves taken by startups like Wrtn also receive support from Korean government.

"Recent surveys...found that South Korea's AI technology, particularly in single intelligence, is superior to China, Europe and Japan," said Lee Jun-hee, director of the Deep-Tech Startup Division at the Ministry of SMEs and Startups. "This shows that South Korean startups have the potential to compete with major countries in the AI technology sector."

Lee said that the ministry plans to support different policies aimed at nurturing outstanding AI startups and fortifying their global presence, through schemes such as a program called AI Super Gap Startups that provides financial assistance of up to 2.1 billion won per company for R&D and commercialization purposes. The ministry also aims to form a consultative body for large companies to work with domestic AI startups, he added.

Meanwhile, large companies are still keen to develop their own models. Samsung, for instance, last December unveiled its self-developed LLM called Samsung Gauss and incorporated it into its Galaxy S24 series, as part of the tech giant's bold move to join the fierce generative AI race.

Lee Se-young, CEO of Wrtn Technologies, speaks during an internal meeting in February. Courtesy of Wrtn Technologies

In the future, Wrtn hopes to expand its service into overseas markets such as Japan, the Middle East and Southeast Asia. In order to achieve this, Lee said that the company is going to open “a big global round” of funding by the end of the year.

As of February, the company recorded an MAU of 1.6 million, which the team is aiming to more than triple to 5 million by the year's end.

Lee is confident in hitting this target, as the team has recently been upgrading the features on the platform, such as its search service Wrtn Search, which aggregates real-time search results from different websites and is expected to be four times faster than the previous one, as well as another feature for users to build their own personalized chatbots.

“Search engine has shown the potential of attracting millions and millions of users. It's a proven need. That's one big bet we have,” said Lee.

Ann Cao is a tech reporter with the South China Morning Post. She is currently based in Seoul, reporting for both The Korea Times and the South China Morning Post under an exchange program.