South Korean tech giant Kakao wants a piece of the action in the generative AI race, and today it made a bid for it, with big updates to its AI image generator Karlo and its KoGPT large language model, as well as a new fund to back AI image generating startups.

Kakao’s AI division Kakao Brain‘s launch of Karlo 2.0 — an AI-powered tool that can produce images from text prompts — enables users to generate an image in just a matter of seconds by inputting prompts in English or Korean.