TLDR: LG AI Research has partnered with generative AI infrastructure company FriendliAI to make its cutting-edge EXAONE 4.0 AI model publicly available for the first time. This collaboration leverages FriendliAI’s serverless inference platform to offer developers and enterprises efficient, scalable access to EXAONE 4.0’s advanced reasoning and natural language generation capabilities, removing traditional infrastructure barriers.
LG AI Research, the artificial intelligence research division of LG Corporation, has announced a strategic partnership with FriendliAI Inc., a leading generative AI infrastructure company, to significantly expand the accessibility of its latest AI model, EXAONE 4.0. This collaboration marks the first time EXAONE 4.0 will be publicly available, enabling developers and enterprises worldwide to integrate its powerful capabilities into their applications through FriendliAI’s high-performance serverless inference infrastructure.
EXAONE 4.0 represents LG AI Research’s newest breakthrough in large language models (LLMs). It is distinguished as Korea’s first hybrid AI model, combining the strengths of an LLM for understanding and generating human language with a reasoning AI model capable of forming and testing hypotheses independently to solve complex problems. This upgraded integrated model builds upon the LLM-based EXAONE 3.5 by incorporating inference functionality, including self-verification capabilities, to produce high-level answers, making it particularly useful in specialized fields such as science, mathematics, biology, and chemistry. The EXAONE series, which debuted in 2021, stands for ‘Expert AI for Everyone’ and is known for its multimodal capabilities, processing both language and visual data.
The partnership aims to democratize access to advanced AI. FriendliAI’s optimized inference platform allows EXAONE 4.0 to be deployed at scale efficiently, offering high throughput and low latency without the typical infrastructure constraints. Byung-Gon Chun, founder and Chief Executive Officer of FriendliAI, emphasized the ease of access, stating, “Through our partnership with LG, we’re giving developers, from startups to global enterprises, a frictionless way to quickly begin deploying the EXAONE 4.0 model. With just a few lines of code, any organization can harness the full potential of EXAONE 4.0 without the usual complexity.” Hwayoung (Edward) Lee, Vice President and Lead of AI Business Transformation Unit at LG AI Research, added, “FriendliAI’s high-performance platform makes it easy for organizations to test and deploy applications built using the new series of EXAONE 4.0 models without investing in infrastructure. Their inference platform delivers the efficiency and speed needed for real-world deployment of EXAONE 4.0 at scale.”
EXAONE 4.0 has demonstrated impressive performance in various benchmark tests, scoring 92.3 on MMLU-Redux and 81.8 on MMLU-Pro, which measure knowledge and problem-solving. It also achieved 75.4 in the science-focused GPQA-Diamond test and 85.3 in the math problem-solving AIME 2025 test, outperforming several leading open-weight models from the U.S., China, and France. The model can handle requests in Korean, English, and Spanish. For research and educational purposes, EXAONE 4.0 has been released as an open-weight model on Hugging Face, a global open-source AI platform. Additionally, a commercial Application Programming Interface (API) service has been launched in partnership with FriendliAI, an official AI model distribution partner of Hugging Face, allowing individual developers and companies to easily integrate EXAONE into their services without requiring high-performance graphics processing units.
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This move aligns with LG Group’s broader strategic investments in future technologies. Led by billionaire Koo Kwang-mo, the conglomerate announced a 100 trillion won ($74 billion) five-year investment plan in South Korea’s future technologies, including AI, biotech, and cleantech, in March. LG AI Research’s leader of the EXAONE Lab, Lee Jin-sik, affirmed, “We’ll continue our research and development so that EXAONE becomes Korea’s representative frontier model and proves its competitiveness in the global market.” The company also held ‘EXAONE Partners Day’ to foster collaboration with 22 local partner companies and plans to showcase its latest AI achievements, including EXAONE 4.0, at the ‘LG AI Talk Concert 2025’ next Tuesday at LG Sciencepark in Seoul.
