In an effort to increase its footprint in North America, South Korean creator of artificial intelligence technology Upstage has established a new office in Silicon Valley. At the GPU Technology Conference, a global AI event hosted by Nvidia, the new branch “Upstage AI” will present its massive language model-based solution “Solar”.

Solar is an AI platform that uses deep learning to generate and comprehend content. August 2023 saw the solution take first place on a worldwide large language model leaderboard presented by New York City-based AI startup Hugging Face. There were over 500 models in this competition, one of which was GPT-3, a ChatGPT-based service.

Upstage said that its US branch will look into potential joint ventures with burgeoning Silicon Valley IT companies. At the GPU Technology Conference, a four-day event in San Jose scheduled for March 18, the US branch will showcase Solar application cases. Upstage predicts that this year’s participation will total roughly 300,000 visitors.

“We will leverage our world-class platform Solar to provide optimized LLM solutions to American and global enterprises, seek various cooperation opportunities, and successfully achieve global expansion,” Upstage CEO Kim Sung-hoon declared in a statement on March 18. Subsequently, the company wants to reach Southeast Asia, Japan, and Europe.

The LLM model will be integrated with optical character recognition (OCR) technology as part of Upstage’s update plans for Solar.

OCR retrieves important information from handwritten text images, allowing for a smooth transition to machine-encoded text. “FoodLens,” an AI system that recommends different kinds of recipes based on dietary objectives and eating patterns, presently uses Upstage’s OCR method.

Nutritional data based on food photos is provided by the dietary management system, which is powered by Kakao Talk, the most popular smartphone messaging service in South Korea.