Crafton announced on the 23rd that it has created the positions of Chief AI Officer (CAIO) and AP.

Crafton announced on the 23rd that it has created the position of chief AI officer (CAIO) and appointed Lee Kang-wook, head of Crafton’s AI division, as the new CAIO. CAIO is the chief executive officer of Krafton’s AI research and development and medium- to long-term technology strategy.

CAIO received his Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer engineering from the University of California, Berkeley in 2016, and has been a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison since 2019. He researches AI in general, including deep learning and machine learning, and from 2022 will also serve as the head of Crafton AI. After this appointment, he will also serve as General Manager of the AI ​​Headquarters.

In particular, he has focused on overhauling Crafton’s AI research system and upgrading its technology capabilities, and has led research and development in key AI areas such as machine learning (ML), language models (LM), natural language processing (NLP), reinforcement learning (RL), and multimodal models. In addition, our research results have been internationally recognized, with a total of 57 Crafton papers accepted at global AI conferences such as NeurIPS, ICML, and ICLR.

Last year, he oversaw a collaborative project with Nvidia that introduced CPCs (Co-Playable Characters), where users and AI interact in real time, opening up new possibilities for extending the user experience. Since last year, it has been participating in a government-led independent AI infrastructure model project and leading the development of key technologies for Crafton.

He recently stepped down as a tenured professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison to focus on Crafton’s AI research and development and medium- to long-term technology strategy.

With this appointment, Crafton plans to further strengthen its game AI research and development structure and expand its medium- to long-term technology, including physical AI.

First, we aim to advance AI technology that can be used in games and improve the quality of interactive content that utilizes AI, such as CPC. Frees developers to focus on creative planning and implementation by reducing repetitive and arduous tasks for production and operational efficiency.

In new business fields over the medium to long term, we will continue research into physical AI and robotics based on the game company’s AI source technology and strengths. Research is being carried out through a separate corporation, and preparations are underway to establish a subsidiary in South Korea with the U.S. as the parent company. The name of the corporation will be Ludo Robotics, and the Korean corporation will be led by CAIO Lee Kang-wook.

Crafton believes that the large-scale interaction data accumulated during the development and operation of games and the experience of operating virtual worlds could provide a meaningful competitive advantage in physical AI and robotics research as a whole. In particular, we are focusing on software (SW) that is responsible for the intelligence of robots, and are focusing on the possibility of medium- to long-term research that can verify areas that are difficult to reproduce in a real environment in a virtual environment.

“At Crafton, we don’t see AI as a technology that can replace humans or creation, but rather as a tool that expands imagination and creativity,” said Kang Wook, CAIO at Crafton. “We will focus on our core business of games and also consider the long-term expansion potential of AI technology and databases.”