PANGYO, Korea (August 16, 2023) – NCSOFT, a global premier game developer and publisher, today announced ‘VARCO LLM’, its own AI language models developed and released for the first time among the game companies in Korea. VARCO is the brand name referring to all models, products and services built on its language models, containing the meaning of ‘Via AI, Realize your Creativity and Originality.’

The LLMs operated under VARCO can be classified into four categories: Foundation, Prompt, Dialogue, and Generative models. The performance of the models in each of the categories depends on the size of their parameters.

NCSOFT today first launched small- and medium-sized VARCO LLMs for Korean language. It offers easy and convenient business applications, attributable to the high-quality data these models were trained with, which were specifically selected by NCSOFT from the early stages of development.

VARCO is the first language model developed by Korean company to be offered via Amazon SageMaker JumpStart, which is a machine learning (ML) hub with foundational models, built-in algorithms, and prebuilt ML solutions. Under this collaboration, VARCO is now available worldwide to Amazon SageMaker users with a one-month free trial.

NCSOFT will unveil a Korean-English bilingual model within this month. The company also plans to reveal additional language models of different sizes and categories consecutively.

NCSOFT today also introduced three generative AI services powered by VARCO LLM. These include ‘VARCO Art’, a text-to-image generation tool; ‘VARCO Text’, a text generation and management tool; and ‘VARCO Human’, an integrated tool for creating, editing, and managing digital humans. The three services will collectively be called as ‘VARCO Studio’, which aims to improve efficiency in different fields of game development such as game design and art.

NCSOFT will further accelerate various AI research and business projects powered by VARCO LLM, including digital humans, generative AI platforms, and conversational language models. Adding on, the company plans to bring domain-specific models that combine cutting-edge AI technology with the expertise of various partners from different fields – ranging from education to finance and biotechnology.

Jehee lee, Chief Research Officer (CRO) of NCSOFT, said, “VARCO demonstrates the highest level of performance among other Korean models of similar sizes available to date.” He continued, “NCSOFT will leverage VARCO to offer new original value and experiences in various domains as well as game content development.”

More information on VARCO LLM is available on the official tech blog, ‘NC Research’.