Victor Lavrenko co-founded the Vietnamese search engine in 2013. / Photo credit: Coc Coc
Victor Lavrenko, co-founder and former CEO of Coc Coc, is embarking on a project called Coc Coc AI, which he believes will help the Vietnamese search engine regain its competitiveness in the domestic market.
Lavrenko was a member of Coc Coc’s founding team in 2013, looking to challenge the dominance of Google in Vietnam. The group wanted to provide more localized search experiences to Vietnamese users.
The ex-CEO, however, left the company in 2017 and later had a fallout with management, which Tech in Asia previously detailed in this report.
See also: Coc Coc is aiming to be Vietnam’s Bing. Its ex-CEO wants to stop it
The entrepreneur believes that even as all browsers and search engines are integrating AI into their services, they won’t be prioritizing the Vietnamese language, giving Coc Coc an opportunity to strike back.
“For example, if one types ‘a woman wearing a beautiful dress’ into Bing, the result will have only white women wearing classical Western dresses. We are working on a diffusion model that has a bias toward Vietnamese-related content,” Lavrenko said in an email interview with Tech in Asia.
He said his team is also building a language model for Vietnamese text based on an open-source version of GPT.
Lavrenko acknowledges the challenges of getting Coc Coc and its shareholders on board with this project. However, he is open to negotiating with his former company.
In a statement to Tech in Asia, Vu Anh Nguyen, current CEO of Coc Coc, said Lavrenko has no right to use the Coc Coc brand for his project since he’s no longer with the company.
According to Statista, Coc Coc’s market share has been dropping to about 5% among browsers and 3% among search engines. Nguyen, however, noted that these numbers don’t accurately reflect the firm’s position in the country.
“Our total user base has now reached 29 million and has a growth of 1 million compared to 2021,” he said, adding that Coc Coc will release its AI integration in the second quarter of this year.
Meanwhile, search engine giant Baidu is one of the biggest competitors to ChatGPT from China and is currently leading the scene in its home country. Other Chinese firms looking to launch their own generative AI service include Tencent, Alibaba, NetEase, and ByteDance.
Editing by Lorenzo Kyle Subido
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