Korean AI startup Upstage launches SOLAR MINI small language model on AWS

South Korean artificial intelligence (AI) startup Upstage has launched its flagship SOLAR MINI Small Language Model (SLM) on Amazon Web Services (AWS). The model is available in Korean and English on Amazon JumpStart and AWS Marketplace, with Thai and Japanese to be available within the year.

The compact yet versatile model is easy to customize and fine-tune to perform a wide range of language tasks such as understanding, summarizing, translating, and predicting new content. Using this SLM, Upstage customers can get started with generative AI without having to train their models from scratch and launch new applications across a broad range of industries including entertainment, healthcare, research, ecommerce, and education

"Upstage's SOLAR MINI on AWS is a powerful solution that helps enterprises of all sizes to easily embrace generative AI at the local level. Language models are evolving rapidly and Upstage is at the forefront of this innovation, taking advantage of AWS's secure and scalable stack to expand its AI offerings and provide organizations across industries with the tools they need to easily deploy generative AI to their applications," said Jeongwon Yoon, country director, worldwide public sector, AWS Korea.

SLMs are lightweight and use less than 20 billion parameters compared with large language models (LLMs) that are in the hundreds of billions of parameters. With a smaller training dataset of 10.7 billion parameters, SOLAR MINI can run inference at lower costs.

The announcement comes on the heels of AWS's commitment to invest KRW 7.85 trillion ($5.88 billion) in cloud infrastructure in South Korea by 2027. This investment is anticipated to significantly bolster the country's cloud services capacity, contributing an estimated KRW 15.06 trillion ($11.28 billion) to South Korea's total gross domestic product (GDP) and supporting an average of 12,325 full-time equivalent (FTE) jobs annually across South Korean businesses.