Kakao is preparing to unveil Kanana 2.5, a 150-billion-parameter large language model designed for AI agents, as the company moves to bring personalized AI services to users of its flagship messenger, KakaoTalk.
“Kanana 2.5, like Kanana 2, was developed from scratch for an agent AI platform,” CEO Chung Shin-a said Tuesday during the company’s first-quarter earnings call. “On base-model benchmarks, we confirmed that it delivers the best performance among domestic and overseas large language models of a similar parameter size.”
Chung said Kanana 2.5 has less than 10 percent of the parameter count of major global models, but performs better in areas Kakao needs for its services, including planning and function calling.
Kakao positions the model less as a race for scale and more as a tool for powering task-based services across its own platforms.
The company also noted its proprietary tokenizer as a key part of its AI infrastructure, saying the tool, completed last year, has sharply reduced training costs and improved inference speed.
Chung said the Kanana tokenizer maintains English-language processing performance while offering the strongest Korean-language compression efficiency among publicly disclosed Korean and overseas models.
Korean can require 1.5 to three times more tokens than English to express the same meaning when processed through general-purpose tokenizers, she said. As explained by OpenAI's developers' site, "Text generation and embeddings models process text in chunks called tokens, ... which represent commonly occurring sequences of characters."
“With the Kanana tokenizer, we confirmed that training costs can be reduced by up to 40 percent compared with existing tokenizers, while inference speed can improve by up to 60 percent,” Chung said.
The gains are expected to support Kakao’s plan to roll out AI agent services more broadly through KakaoTalk.
“Kakao is completing the technical preparations to scale up an agent AI platform for the mass market much faster than the market expects,” Chung said.
Kakao’s longer-term AI vision centers on personalized agents inside KakaoTalk.
“We are preparing both services and models on the assumption that all 50 million users will be onboarded,” she said. “Through on-device AI models and partnerships, we have designed the system so that costs do not scale one-for-one with user growth or engagement.”
Kakao also reported record first-quarter earnings Tuesday. Consolidated operating profit came to 211.4 billion won ($145.7 million) in the January-March period, up 66 percent from a year earlier. Revenue rose 11 percent on-year to 1.94 trillion won. Both figures were record highs for a first quarter.
yeeun@heraldcorp.com
