A team from Upstage, a Korean artificial intelligence tech startup, won the gold medal at Kaggle, dubbed as the world’s AI Olympics, challenged by 6 million contestants from 194 countries.

Upstage’s AI research engineers Kim Yoon-soo and Kim Sang-hoon received the top prize at Kaggle’s latest contest of developing machine learning algorithms for sorting texts by readability, the company announced Friday. The contest, hosted by non-profit educational technology organization, ran for three months since May.

Kim Yoon-soo has become the sixth and the youngest AI grandmaster in Korea upon winning the gold medal. He is ranked No. 24 in the global Kaggle community.

Kaggle grandmaster is a title given to an AI expert who has won at least five gold medals at a global competition run by Kaggle, global tech giant Google’s online community for data scientists and machine learning practitioners. So far, only 0.1 percent of the world’s 160,000 AI experts have been given the grandmaster title.

The latest win is the 10th gold medal for Kim Sang-hoon, Upstage team leader who became Korea’s third Kaggle grandmaster in 2020. Kim boasting over 14 years of experience in machine learning and data science is ranked No. 15 in the world.

Upstage is a Korean AI tech startup that has been in operation for less than a year. It has 45 employees and 77 percent of the all employees are engineers. The company recently developed the Korean Language Understanding Evaluation (KLUE) benchmark, a collection of resources for training, evaluating, and analyzing natural language understanding systems, in partnership with other industry experts.

By Hong Sung-yong and Cho Jeehyun

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