At AWS re:Invent, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced that LG AI Research (LG AI), the artificial intelligence (AI) research hub of South Korean conglomerate LG Group, has launched its AI image-to-text captioning solution on AWS. The new captioning solution uses LG AI's EXAONE, a 300-billion-parameter, multimodal foundation model (FM) that creates more accurate and relevant content for worldwide customers across industries like advertising, fashion, and retail.

EXAONE's new zero-shot, image-captioning solution uses generative AI to automatically understand and describe unseen objects or scenes, much like human cognition, using previous experiences, knowledge, and training. This ability enables EXAONE to write accurate image captions and keywords with a high level of detail, using near-human deductions while comprehending images and text in both Korean and English. Industries like advertising can use LG AI's technology to automate product descriptions or create new content for advertising and marketing campaigns. LG AI uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud, to cost effectively scale IT resources on demand as the number of parameters expands during EXAONE's training.

Leveraging the scalability of AWS, LG AI's customers, including consumer-goods companies and marketing agencies, can generate more than 2,000 image captions per hour. LG AI trained EXAONE with 350 million high-resolution images and text pairs using Amazon SageMaker, a fully managed service to build, train, and deploy machine learning (ML) models. Using the cloud, LG AI can finetune results, implement checkpoints, and quickly resolve issues like data bias, faster and at a lower cost than on-premises infrastructure.

"AI is revolutionizing many industries, and we are excited about this technology's potential to cost effectively help people become more creative," said Edward Lee, vice president of LG AI Research. "LG AI's EXAONE is a powerful tool that makes generative AI more accessible for creative fields, and AWS's industry-leading machine learning capabilities have helped us to rapidly develop and deploy our innovative solutions. Our vision is to help creatives drive new levels of efficiency and enable companies to focus on creating rather than on tedious activities like image searches."

Through EXAONE, LG AI is collaborating with organizations worldwide to accelerate the adoption of generative AI across a range of creative industries. This includes a collaboration with Parsons School of Design, a leading U.S. college, to develop technologies and services involving generative AI with experts in fashion, design, and media. LG AI also developed Tilda, an AI virtual artist that uses EXAONE to produce all-new images when given text prompts. Tilda created 3,000 images and patterns to help fashion designer Younhee Park create more than 200 outfits for 2022 New York Fashion Week.

LG AI is also delivering generative AI solutions to companies across the LG Group. In August, LG Household & Health Care launched ‘IMPRINTU,' an instant temporary tattoo printer that uses LG AI's generative AI technology on AWS to create thousands of unique designs that can be printed on skin or clothing. LG AI will also provide its EXAONE model to LG affiliated companies to generate software code and boost the productivity and creativity of its engineers who are developing household appliances and home entertainment products of tomorrow.

"Generative AI is one of the most transformational technologies of our lifetime, significantly impacting productivity and creativity," said Vasi Philomin, vice president of Generative AI at AWS. "As the content generation industry booms, LG AI Research is showing how technology like the EXAONE ideation platform can foster better collaboration between AI, designers, and artists with its rapid image-to-text captioning solution built on AWS. We look forward to supporting LG's AI research institute in scaling its generative AI innovations to unleash new levels of creativity worldwide."

The LG AI EXAONE image-to-text solution is now available to millions of AWS's global active customers through AWS Marketplace, a digital catalog with thousands of software listings from independent software vendors, and on Amazon SageMaker Jumpstart, an ML hub that provides access to pre-trained models that are customizable for individual use cases. LG AI is also planning to migrate EXAONE to Amazon Bedrock, a fully managed service that makes multiple FMs available via an API. This gives customers greater choice to test, privately customize, and deploy the model that works best for their specific use case.