PNN
Bengaluru (Karnataka) [India], April 2 — KRAFTON, Inc. has unveiled Raon, its inaugural family of open-source AI models, with the first four models made available on the global AI platform Hugging Face. The name Raon, derived from a Korean word signifying “joy,” signifies KRAFTON’s commitment to leveraging AI in the creation of innovative gaming experiences.
This launch underscores KRAFTON’s capacity to develop sophisticated AI models internally, encompassing the entire process from data collection and preparation to training, evaluation, and public release. The introduction of Raon represents a significant stride in enhancing KRAFTON’s long-term global AI capabilities. The initial offerings include Raon-Speech, Raon-SpeechChat, Raon-OpenTTS, and Raon-VisionEncoder, each designed to foster future gaming experiences that facilitate more natural voice interactions, intelligent AI characters, and improved comprehension of voice, text, and images.
Raon-Speech, a speech AI model capable of understanding and generating spoken language, has been recognized as a leader globally in both English and Korean among public speech language models under 10 billion parameters. It ranked first based on evaluations across seven core speech tasks and 40 benchmarks, including speech recognition, speech generation, and question answering.
Another model, Raon-SpeechChat, aims to enhance the fluidity of real-time conversations. Utilizing full-duplex technology, this model can begin responding even while the user is mid-sentence. It is the first real-time full-duplex speech model announced in Korea and boasts top-tier rankings in global benchmarks concerning backchanneling, interruption handling, response latency, and safety across 13 key tasks.
Raon-OpenTTS stands as a text-to-speech model trained exclusively on publicly available speech data, with KRAFTON releasing a curated training dataset alongside it. In listening tests assessing the naturalness of generated speech, Raon-OpenTTS showed exceptional performance, rivaling global research-grade text-to-speech models that were trained on non-public data.
Lastly, Raon-VisionEncoder is a vision encoding model created in-house using publicly available data, enabling AI systems to interpret and process visual information. KRAFTON has made the complete development process public, including data curation and training methodology. Evaluations on image classification tasks indicated that this model achieved 90.6% of the performance of Google’s SigLIP2 vision encoder.
Accompanying the model releases, KRAFTON issued three technical papers detailing the training processes, aimed at supporting the broader global AI research community. “The release of the Raon model family is an important milestone in our journey to build AI capabilities,” stated Kangwook Lee, Chief AI Officer at KRAFTON, Inc. “By sharing large-scale training data and core models as open source, we hope researchers and developers can use them freely. We also look forward to contributing to the advancement of multimodal technology and the growth of the domestic AI ecosystem.”
KRAFTON has been intensifying its AI initiatives in recent years, including the introduction of KIRA, a personal AI assistant, and the open-source release of Terminus-KIRA, a technology aimed at enhancing AI agent performance. The company plans to continue expanding its efforts in AI model development and research on AI agents.
Founded in 2007 and headquartered in Korea, KRAFTON, Inc. is a global game developer and publisher with a diverse portfolio of studios including PUBG STUDIOS and Striking Distance Studios. The company aims to create compelling gaming worlds and has produced popular titles such as PUBG: BATTLEGROUNDS and Subnautica. KRAFTON India’s significant contributions to mobile gaming in the country include its flagship title BATTLEGROUNDS MOBILE INDIA (BGMI), which has surpassed 260 million downloads. Additionally, KRAFTON India has invested over $250 million in local startups across interactive entertainment, gaming, esports, and technology since 2021, while also supporting emerging developers through the KRAFTON India Gaming Incubator (KIGI).
As the landscape of AI continues to evolve, KRAFTON’s commitment to open-source development and its strategic investments may play a crucial role in shaping future advancements, both in gaming and the broader AI ecosystem.
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