SafetyDetectives recently sat down with Luke Kim, the CEO and Co-Founder of Liner, to discuss the innovative journey and future plans of their groundbreaking AI search platform. From its humble beginnings in a college startup club to becoming a global leader in internet highlighting and AI-driven search, Liner has consistently pushed the boundaries of technology. In the interview, Luke shares insights on Liner’s mission to provide reliable sources and answers, the role of AI in productivity tools, and the company’s commitment to data privacy and security. He also discusses exciting future developments aimed at enhancing user experience and trust in AI.
Can you tell us about your background and what led you to establish Liner?
I’ve always wanted to start a business. When I entered University, I created a startup club where I met Liner’s co-founder, Brian Woo. Together, we started “Ainno Gallery” to explore online exhibition services. Ainno Gallery provided a platform for exhibitions and art distribution, aiming to innovate the closed art distribution market. The venture was successful, generating revenue and bringing innovation to the art distribution industry.
- Pivotal Experience in Hong Kong
Ainno Gallery was recognized as one of Asia’s top 100 venture companies. When I visited Hong Kong to receive an award, I had a profound eye-opening experience. I saw venture companies from different countries and was amazed by the scale of their operations and services. Seeing companies with user numbers and revenues much larger than I was used to made me realize the different magnitudes involved. While I thought 1 million users were impressive, these companies were servicing tens of millions of users.
- The Birth of ‘Liner’
With the capital I earned from operating Ainno Gallery over 2-3 years, totaling 40 million won, I embarked on a bold journey to Silicon Valley. After planning over 150 commercialization projects in Korea, our team (consisting of Brian, a designer, an engineer, and myself) aimed to develop one app per week at our Airbnb accommodation in Silicon Valley.
For two months, we assessed user needs in the field and created and uploaded a new app every week. During this time, we developed eight apps, each catering to distinct user needs and preferences. These included an app for compliment relays and one for using remaining smartphone space as a USB device. The third app we developed was Liner, the web highlighter app. Liner originated from my habit of reading books and underlining key passages.
From the day of release, we saw that there were a couple hundred downloads happening, numbers we hadn’t come close to with our previous apps.
Thanks to its convenience, Liner’s user numbers grew organically, making it the world’s premier internet highlighter service and information search platform.
- Integration of AI into Liner’s Services
What was Liner’s goal then? The goal wasn’t to become the world’s number 1 highlighter app. The ultimate goal was to become a search engine that was much more reliable than Google.
We saw each highlight as coordinates where people were marking important information across the web. These highlights, when accumulated, could act as a filtering layer that can help people find important information much faster.
We recognized the prevalence of false or irrelevant information on the internet and aimed to leverage our high-quality highlight data to deliver a superior service that goes beyond traditional search engines. Our goal was to innovate the user experience, ensuring maximum utility and efficiency while offering a service that surpasses existing search engines in quality and relevance. Originally conceived as a web highlighter, Liner has evolved into more than just a highlighting tool.
- Evolution of Liner into an AI Search Engine
My interest in AI grew as our team delved deeply into using Liner’s ‘highly reliable information data’. The emergence of ChatGPT in November 2022 provided a clear opportunity to integrate Liner’s data and machine learning technology into the GPT API, paving the way for the development of the ‘Liner AI agent’ to revolutionize information search. With a proactive approach to incorporating AI technology, we successfully introduced Liner AI in February 2023, just three months after ChatGPT’s introduction.
What is the mission of Liner and how does it differentiate itself from other AI productivity tools such as ChatGPT or Grammarly?
The strength of the Liner AI search engine is its ability to provide a user experience optimized for “identifying information sources” so users can quickly determine the validity and relevance of AI search results. Liner selects reliable sources based on highlighting data accumulated since 2015, providing accurate answers and reducing concerns about hallucinations in the responses. Liner’s highlight data is of the highest quality because it’s based on data that people consider important and have selected directly.
By fine-tuning this highlight data accumulated since 2015, Liner secured source technology and reduced instances of hallucinations compared to ChatGPT. As a result, the number of users seeking professional knowledge beyond universal information has increased. Accordingly, Liner began developing functions useful to users who want to search for in-depth information. Liner also has a “Scholar Search Mode” that provides answers from academic papers and journals.
Currently, Liner combines AI models (GPT-4, Claude, Gemini, Llama) with our own high-quality data to provide AI search services optimized for information search. Ninety percent of Liner’s paid subscribers are college students, master’s degree holders, doctoral degree holders, researchers, and professionals. It’s widely used by those seeking expertise more efficiently based on transparent and accurate sources, and these users are very satisfied with the service.
What trends do you see shaping the future of AI in productivity tools?
Since AI can dramatically improve productivity in certain areas, people will adopt these tools very quickly. But for now, there is no clear winner for each use case, like finding information, designing slides, checking grammar, and so on.
In the near future, there will be a lot of competition in each productivity use case, with many products competing, and only a few will remain. After that, the few winners in each productivity category will become the standard, and people won’t switch from using them.
It’s similar to the early days of smartphones. At first, there was a lot of discussion about which app to use, but eventually, everyone knew which app to use for specific tasks like memos, photos, browsing, networking, and so on.
How do you see the role of AI evolving in the workplace over the next few years?
Nvidia’s Jensen Huang said, “AI is not going to replace your job. The person who uses AI will replace your job.” In the next few years, people who get used to using powerful AI tools for each use case will be much more productive than those who don’t adopt AI.
Some people say that “agents” are going to completely replace many people’s jobs soon. But I think not. The reason is that people don’t trust AI yet. If you can’t trust AI for even simple tasks, how can you completely delegate your work to an AI?
So maybe, in the end, AI agents can replace many tasks, but there are limits to replacing people’s roles themselves. However, I think we can imagine more groundbreaking situations after building a lot of trust in AI.
How does Liner address concerns about data privacy and security for its users?
Liner has a separate compliance task force organization and policies for the protection and security of users. Additionally, all data is encrypted and managed securely. We conduct related training to protect user information, perform periodic checks to ensure information security, and strive to protect our users.
What are your future plans for Liner? Are there any upcoming features or expansions you’re excited about?
Liner is upgrading its “Liner AI Agent” with a mission called “Help People Get Smart Faster.” In the future, we want to intelligently solve various stresses that people experience in the process of acquiring knowledge through AI technology.
We’re focusing on the US market. Our initial target customers are university students, graduate students, and researchers who search for deep knowledge. What we’ve found is that people don’t fully trust AI yet, so we’re very focused on creating a more trustworthy user experience and the technology that powers it. In the near future, we’ll focus on providing trustworthy sources alongside the direct answers the AI gives so that people can feel confident using the service.
Another strength of Liner is its ability to provide super-personalized answers based on data accumulated over a decade. We also plan to focus on advancing “personalization” in the future. For example, even if two people searched for the same keyword “investment,” Liner could provide answers closer to what each user wants, depending on whether they viewed real estate-related information or data on stocks.