companies

LG AI Research

LG Corporation's dedicated AI research arm, building the EXAONE family of Korean large language models and pushing them into LG's own enterprise tools.

LG AI Research was established in December 2020 as a cross-affiliate research organization inside LG Corporation, tasked with building foundation models that LG's various businesses—electronics, chemicals, displays, and beyond—could draw on rather than each developing AI separately. Its flagship output is EXAONE, first released in December 2021 as one of Korea's early large-scale language models, which has since gone through several generations, including an open-weight release in December 2024 and a hybrid reasoning model, EXAONE 4.0, in 2025. Leadership changed in 2025 when Bae Kyung-hoon, who had led LG AI Research since its founding, departed to become Korea's Minister of Science and ICT. Woo-hyung Lim and Honglak Lee, an EECS professor at the University of Michigan who had served as the lab's chief AI scientist, took over as co-heads of the research organization. LG AI Research organizes its work into several labs covering language, physical, bio, data, and materials intelligence, and has begun pushing EXAONE-based products into specific domains, including a K-EXAONE Korean sovereign foundation model and an EXAONE Path variant aimed at precision medicine, alongside ChatEXAONE, an internal enterprise assistant for LG's own workforce.

Founded

2020

Headquarters

Seoul, South Korea

Sector

lab