Naver’s large language model is powering shopping recommendations Posted on : Dec 08 - 2021

In June, Naver, the Seongnam, South Korea-based company that operates the eponymous search engine Naver, announced that it had trained one of the largest AI language models of its kind, called HyperCLOVA. Naver claimed that the system learned 6,500 times more Korean data than OpenAI’s GPT-3 and contained 204 billion parameters, the parts of the machine learning model learned from historical training data. (GPT-3 has 175 billion parameters.)

HyperCLOVA was seen as a notable achievement because of the scale of the model and since it fits into the trend of generative model “diffusion,” with multiple actors developing GPT-3-style models, like Huawei’s PanGu-Alpha (stylized PanGu-α). The benefits of large language models — including the ability to generate human-like text for marketing and customer support purposes — were previously limited to English because companies lacked the resources to train these models in other languages.

In the months since HyperCLOVA was developed, Naver has begun using it to personalize search results on the Naver platform, Naver executive officer Nako Sung told VentureBeat in an interview. It’ll also soon become available in private beta through HyperCLOVA Studio, a no-code tool that’ll allow developers to access the model for text generation and classification tasks.

“Initially used to correct typos in search queries on Naver Search, [HyperCLOVA] is now enabling many new features on our ecommerce platform, Naver Shopping, such as summarizing multiple consumer reviews into one line, recommending and curating products to user shopping preferences, or generating trendy marketing phrases for featured shopping collections,” Sung said. “We also launched CLOVA CareCall, a … conversational agent for elderly citizens who live alone. The service is based on the HyperCLOVA’s natural conversation generation capabilities, allowing it to have human-like conversations.”

Large language models

Training HyperCLOVA, which can understand English and Japanese in addition to Korean, required large-scale datacenter infrastructure, according to Sung. Naver leveraged a server cluster made up of 140 Nvidia SuperPod A100 DGX nodes, which the company claims can deliver up to 700 petaflops of compute power.

It took months to train HyperCLOVA on 2TB of Korean text data, much of which came from user-generated content on Naver’s platforms. For example, one source was Knowledge iN, a Quora-like, Korean-language community where users can ask questions on topics to receive answers from experts. Another was public blost posts from people who use free web hosting services provided through Naver.

Sung says that this differentiates HyperCLOVA from previous large language models like GPT-3, which have a limited ability to understand the nuances of languages besides English. He claims that by having the model draw on the “collective intelligence of Korean culture and society,” it can better serve Korean users — and at the same time reduce Naver’s dependence on other, less Asia Pacific-centric AI services. View more