NC AI banner image. /Courtesy of NC AI

On the 27th, NC AI, a subsidiary of NCSOFT specializing in artificial intelligence (AI), announced its ambition to rise beyond game AI and become a vertical AI corporation.

NC AI, based on NCSOFT's 14 years of AI research expertise, spun off as an independent corporation last February. NC AI is rapidly bringing actual commercialized AI solutions to the market across various industries, including gaming, fashion, and content. The core of NC AI's technological prowess lies in its self-developed large language model (LLM) known as 'Barco LLM.' The Barco LLM improved Korean performance by adding NC AI's unique fine-tuning technology to its self-built foundation model technology. The Barco model, released in September last year, recorded the top spot among models with fewer than 10 billion parameters in the Logic Korea benchmark and demonstrated superior performance in various fields, including reasoning, mathematics, writing, coding, and grammar.

In particular, the Barco LLM is optimized for various industrial sites where Korean language is crucial, such as chatbots, Q&A, natural language generation, and automatic translation. Last year, it introduced 'Barco LLM 2.0,' which significantly enhanced multilingual support capabilities, alongside the evaluation model 'Barco Judging LLM' to validate LLM performance. This evaluation model has established itself as an industry standard for addressing LLM bias issues, rapid quality assessment, and selecting optimal models for specific services.

NC AI Barco fashion image. /Courtesy of NC AI

The Barco LLM is also contributing to the open-source ecosystem. NC AI publicly released this model on Hugging Face, allowing startups, developers, and small and medium enterprises to freely utilize it. NC AI plans to continue releasing LLM models it develops to promote the launch and utilization of AI services, creating a foundation for the social benefits of AI technological advancement to spread.

Moreover, NC AI's 'Barco Art Fashion,' which demonstrates the potential of vertical AI, is a generative AI model specialized for the fashion industry that has successfully commercialized in both domestic and international markets. This model generates over 10 design proposals automatically within 3.2 seconds when a designer inputs prompts in natural language, based on a 'fashion-specific base model' that has learned industry-specific terminology and trends such as padded jumpers and down jackets. It supports all functionalities needed in the actual fashion industry, including fabric changes, conversions to 2D and 3D, outline extraction, outfit image synthesis, sneaker mockups, and product trend proposals. F&F, a brand famous for MLB and Discovery, adopted the 'Barco Art' solution through concept verification (PoC) with NC AI, demonstrating innovative effects such as shortening the new product development cycle from 6 months to 3 months. Currently, more than 10 fashion companies are considering further adoption.

NC AI Barco voice image. /Courtesy of NC AI

NC AI also possesses exceptional technological capability in the game AI field based on NCSOFT's experience in developing massive multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs). Notably, the AI non-player character (NPC) dialogue system analyzes players' dialogue patterns in real-time to provide customized quests and lines. In global servers, real-time multilingual chat translation based on the Barco LLM is implemented, allowing users from around the world to communicate without language barriers. Furthermore, various AI technologies, including text-to-speech (TTS), voice cloning, emotional acting, and motion capture, are being commercialized to create natural voices, expressions, lip-syncing, and animations for NPCs. These technologies are planned to be opened up in an application programming interface (API) format for upcoming new games slated for release in 2025 and various external game studios.

Already, NC AI's AI voice synthesis, voice cloning, and AI dubbing technologies are being utilized in various ways across OTT content, films, and dramas. For instance, NC AI's TTS and voice transition technology apply the native actor's voice and emotions smoothly to the dialogue of non-native actors, breaking down language barriers. In an OTT drama set to be released in the first half of 2025, NC AI's voice synthesis technology will be applied, allowing the actor's voice to be naturally converted into foreign languages and significantly improving global dubbing quality. The AI dubbing service automates the process of converting voices in videos into text, translating them, and synthesizing them back into audio, which helps K-content reduce localization expenses and time and facilitates global expansion.

NC AI MWC2025 participation image. /Courtesy of NC AI

NC AI is also taking the lead in data protection and AI ethics. The Barco LLM applies an ethical AI framework that meets global standards, focusing on bias resolution, data privacy, transparency, and explainability. By internalizing industry-specific regulations such as the U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and anonymizing data, NC AI is gaining the trust of corporate clients.

NC AI는 데이터 보호와 AI 윤리에도 앞장서고 있다. 바르코 LLM은 편향성 문제 해결 능력, 데이터 프라이버시, 투명성, 설명 가능성 등 글로벌 기준에 부합하는 윤리적 AI 프레임워크를 적용하고 있다. 미국 의료정보보호법(HIPAA), 유럽 일반개인정보보호법(GDPR) 등 산업별 규제를 내재화하고 데이터를 익명화하는 등 노력을 통해 기업고객의 신뢰를 얻고 있다.

Lee Yeon-su, CEO of NC AI, said, 'NC AI will not only continue to develop LLMs that will serve as the foundation for the advancement of AI technology in our country but will also create innovative AI services that add substantial value across various industries,' emphasizing that 'it aims to establish itself as a partner that achieves both efficiency and productivity beyond just providing technology.'