KT Expands Financial AX as BC Card Internalizes AI with an SLM Swarm
IT DAILY ·
✦ AI Summary
KT unveiled AX achievements by group affiliates and AI use cases by industry at "KT Group Connect Week."
BC Card said it is pursuing the internalization of AI technology by linking a closed-network environment with the open-source ecosystem, and it uses an "SLM swarm" architecture.
BC Card operates "BCGPT," "MOAI," and "Paybooc AI," and it also plans to join the "Everyone's AI" consortium led by KT.
KT said on the 21st that it shared AX achievements and growth drivers by affiliate through "KT Group Connect Week" and unveiled AI use cases across industries. KT presented AX cases in major sectors, including finance and media, and broadened its introduction of AI applications to operations and services across the board.
During the event, BC Card, KT Group's financial affiliate, also unveiled its case. The presentation was given by Lee Tae-young, head of the AX team in BC Card's AI Data Division.
BC Card said it is pursuing the internalization of AI technology by linking its closed-network environment with the open-source ecosystem. BC Card is focusing on internalizing AI technology around an "SLM swarm" that uses bundles of SLMs specialized by task.
An "SLM swarm" is an AI architecture in which multiple SLMs optimized for specific purposes handle individual tasks and then aggregate the results, instead of concentrating multiple tasks on a single LLM. BC Card unveiled AI application cases ranging from financial services to internal work automation.
BC Card has expanded AI use in internal operations by running "BCGPT," a generative AI platform specialized for finance, and "MOAI," an AI-based work automation solution.
BC Card has also expanded AI use into everyday services by offering customer-facing services such as "Eat.pl" and "AI Hot Deal." "Eat.pl" is a restaurant recommendation service based on payment data, and "AI Hot Deal" is a service in which AI selects and summarizes discount information.
Lee Tae-young, head of the AX team in BC Card's AI Data Division, said the typical AI transformation approach in the financial sector is to use innovative financial services and external APIs, adding that BC Card's AX has taken a different path from other financial companies.
BC Card's AX strategy is aimed at avoiding simple adoption of commercial AI and instead focusing on securing its own AI technology. BC Card began developing technology to secure its own LLM in 2023.
However, BC Card judged that there were limits to developing a model on the same scale as big tech companies, and accordingly shifted its strategy. The shift involves pursuing both in-house development and external collaboration.
Based on its self-developed 27B model, or 27 billion parameters, "BCGPT," BC Card built an AI chatbot for employees and began applying AI to internal operations.
Later, BC Card shifted its strategy from assigning all tasks to a single LLM to using SLMs optimized for each task. Lee said BC Card has internalized an "SLM Swarm" architecture that configures task-specific models for image recognition, generation, report writing, summarization, and other tasks, and connects those specialized models to the work that needs them. The limits of a single LLM were said to include the need for vast resources.
An SLM Swarm refers to a structure in which multiple SLMs optimized for a specific purpose work together instead of a single LLM. This structure is characterized by the way each model handles individual tasks and then aggregates the results. It was explained that this offers task-specific optimization compared with assigning all work to one large model.
BC Card focused on optimizing models and inference engines rather than simply expanding GPUs to secure AI capabilities.
To that end, BC Card partnered with Neural Magic. Neural Magic is a company founded by researchers from MIT in the United States, and its business areas include AI semiconductors and software. The two sides studied inference engine optimization and AI model operation technology tailored to GPU environments.
Neural Magic was acquired by Red Hat last year. BC Card continued collaborating with Red Hat after the acquisition.
In July, BC Card unveiled its 31B-scale "MOAI" on Hugging Face. GPU optimization technology was applied to "MOAI." Lee said "MOAI" was optimized to run even on relatively low-performance gaming GPUs.
BC Card plans to support development of AI services using public models for small and medium-sized enterprises and individual business owners that have difficulty making large GPU investments.
BC Card is using the MOAI LLM in its "Paybooc AI" service on its mobile app "Paybooc." Paybooc has more than 5 million monthly active users (MAU).
BC Card is expanding the way AI is used in its work. Lee said 15 to 20 AI agents within the organization are collaborating with AI around the clock, from research and development (R&D) to service development, to carry out their work.
At the same time, BC Card plans to join the "Everyone's AI" consortium led by KT to help spread AI services in the financial sector. BC Card plans to identify new services based on its payment data and AI technology, and then expand those services across the financial industry.
KT plans to link the data and AI technologies held by its telecom, media, and financial affiliates to the group's AX strategy. KT plans to expand AI transformation cases by industry.
Source: IT DAILY · Seong Won-young
Original: https://www.itdaily.kr/news/articleView.html?idxno=241758
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Source: IT DAILY
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