We’re proud to introduce ZERO, Korea’s first vision foundation model specifically built for industrial applications. ZERO marks a paradigm shift in how AI is used in real-world industrial settings—redefining the boundaries of what AI can see, understand, and do on the ground.

ZERO Solves Long-Standing Challenges in the Field

In many industrial environments, companies face persistent challenges in adopting AI—excessive time and cost for data collection and labeling, subpar generalization capabilities due to limited training data, and poor adaptability to unpredictable on-site changes. These challenges stem from traditional AI systems confined in a “closed world” or a “closed set,” recognizing only what they’ve been trained on. Just as a model trained on dogs and cats fails to recognize a zebra, existing AI falters when new defect types appear or working conditions shift.

(Problems of introducing traditional AI systems in industrial sites)

ZERO was created to address these fundamental limitations. With ZERO, AI can now understand your intent and take actions instantly—with plain natural language descriptions or simple visual cues.

A Paradigm Shift in AI: The Rise of Vision Foundation Models

Recently, keywords such as Physical AI, Agentic AI, and Vertical AI have been gaining attention in the AI market. ZERO is a core technology that embodies these emerging trends.

You may already be familiar with LLMs (Large Language Models) and VLMs (Vision-Language Models). However, to enable AI to act, perceive, and adapt in the real world—not just understand language and visual information—Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) are essential. If LLMs and VLMs are the "brain" of AI, then VFMs are the "eyes" that allow AI to see and comprehend the world. Only when these are combined can a true AI agent capable of solving complex real-world problems emerge. In fact, in recent tech showcases like NVIDIA’s GTC demo, core visual intelligence tasks such as object recognition and situational awareness were all powered by VFMs.

While open-source development in LLMs and VLMs is thriving, VFMs remain largely proprietary—dominated by a handful of major tech companies in China and the U.S. What enabled Superb AI to become the first in Korea to develop a proprietary VFM was our deep expertise in industrial data and MLOps, built over the past 7 years. We overcame the high barriers of collecting and scaling complex industrial datasets thanks to our unique know-how and infrastructure—paving the way for ZERO.

Unique Technologies behind ZERO: Industry-Specific Intelligence Meets Open-World Understanding

ZERO introduces a set of powerful innovations designed to overcome the limits of conventional vision AI.

1. Purpose-Built for Industrial Data

Unlike general vision models trained on common internet images, ZERO was designed from the ground up to meet the complex and specific needs of real-world industrial sites. Just as doctors are trained on clinical data and medical papers, ZERO was trained using high-quality datasets collected from sectors like manufacturing, logistics, and construction. This enables it to deeply understand industrial environments and go beyond abstract reasoning—providing precise coordinates and object locations that robots and control systems can immediately use. It’s a vision AI purpose-built for industry.

2. Open-World Visual Grounding: Understanding Unlimited Concepts

ZERO’s core technology, Open-World Visual Grounding, goes beyond predefined categories to understand virtually any concept described in natural language. It can accurately locate and identify objects in an image based on detailed descriptions—like “a pipe with rust” or “a worker outside the safety line.” This enables AI to grasp complex, nuanced visual contexts—not just simple object detection—allowing for the construction of advanced automation systems handling a wide range of unexpected real-world scenarios with flexibility and precision. Ultimately, ZERO adapts to the ever-changing variables of industrial environments on its own, ensuring more stable and reliable operations.

• Learn more about Open-World Visual Grounding: Zero-Shot Vision AI: Why One Day is All You Need to Deploy AI

3. Zero-Shot Multimodal Prompting: Easy to Use, Fast to Deploy

ZERO offers exceptional ease of use through zero-shot multimodal prompting. Without any additional data labeling or model training, it can instantly perform visual recognition using a variety of prompts—such as text, bounding boxes, or sketches. This dramatically reduces the time and cost typically required for AI solution development (from 6–9 weeks to instant deployment) and allows even non-expert field workers to leverage AI with ease and direct it to perform specific tasks. It significantly lowers the barriers to AI adoption and operation, supports faster decision-making on the ground, and maximizes AI adaptability to new products or scenarios—enhancing business agility.

• Learn more about Multimodal Prompting: Interactive AI in the Field? Exploring Multi-Prompt Technology

4. Optimized for On-Premise and Edge Environments: Built for Security and Efficiency

With a lightweight design of approximately 622M parameters and high processing efficiency of 1.03 TFLOPS, ZERO can be deployed directly on on-premise servers and edge devices. This enables sensitive industrial data to be processed locally without being transmitted externally—enhancing data security, reducing cloud dependence, and thereby significantly lowering the cost of investment in GPU infrastructure. In other words, powerful AI can be applied on-site at a reasonable cost without the risk of exposing sensitive data. It also ensures stable AI operation in environments without internet access, making it safe and reliable for any industrial site.

ZERO: Behind the Development of an Industry-Tailored Vision Foundation Model

It’s widely believed that building a foundation model requires astronomical time and cost. Many might assume, “There’s no way a foundation model can be developed in Korea.” But we broke that notion—delivering ZERO with dramatically less cost and in record time. This wasn’t just about technical capability—it was the result of synergy between our MLOps expertise and real-world field experience.

ZERO is more than just cutting-edge AI. It’s the culmination of 7 years of deep experience and domain knowledge gained by Superb AI across numerous industrial sites. From detecting minute defects on production lines to optimizing storage efficiency in logistics warehouses, we’ve curated and labeled data ourselves, gaining unmatched insight into where AI is truly needed and how to best utilize it in the field. Throughout this process, we built countless industry-specific models.

This accumulated know-how and the inefficiencies we encountered while developing thousands of custom AI models for individual clients, combined with our ultimate aspiration to create a single, universal AI model that could be applied across any industrial environment, became the driving force behind ZERO. At the heart of ZERO’s development was our MLOps technology—enabling extreme efficiency across the entire pipeline, from data selection and labeling to quality control, model training, and deployment. This allowed us to build and utilize high-quality industrial data essential for training a foundation model.

Unmatched Performance: Proven in Global Challenges

ZERO’s capabilities have been validated in top-tier global benchmarks and competitions.

At CVPR 2025—the world’s largest computer vision conference—Superb AI placed second and fourth in two major international AI challenges, proving the technical excellence of ZERO.

• 2nd Place: Object Instance Detection Challenge This challenge evaluated ‘specific object recognition’ technology required in industries such as manufacturing, logistics, and healthcare. Unlike general object detection, it measured how accurately a model could identify specific items—such as defective parts on a production line or inventory in a logistics warehouse. The focus of this challenge was on assessing the model’s ability to detect objects without data labeling or training, which remain the biggest barriers to AI adoption. ZERO placed second—an outstanding result that demonstrated its technical excellence.
  • Learn more about our CVPR Challenge: CVPR 2025 Object Instance Detection Challenge: Advancing Practical AI for Industrial Applications
• 4th Place: Foundational Few-Shot Object Detection Challenge This challenge tested a model’s ability to recognize new objects across sectors like healthcare, manufacturing, agriculture, and logistics, using just 10 example images and text descriptions. The focus of this challenge was to test how effective general-purpose AI could be in addressing real-world industrial problems.
  • Learn more about our CVPR Challenge 2: CVPR 2025 Foundation Few-Shot Object Detection Challenge: Transforming Future Industries with AI

The key takeaway is that ZERO achieved this high level of performance using only minimal data and training cost. Competing against top universities and research institutions in China equipped with massive datasets and large-scale infrastructure, Superb AI proved that industry-specific strategies and efficient algorithms alone can deliver world-class competitiveness—without the need for expensive infrastructure.

ZERO in the Real World: AI That Works Anytime, Anywhere

ZERO brings the physical barriers to AI adoption down to “zero.” Unlike most high-performance models that require massive computing resources, ZERO’s compact architecture runs smoothly on edge devices and NPUs.

It can be deployed even in environments with limited cloud connectivity or where real-time inference is critical—instantly delivering AI insights at dozens of frames per second.

The Future of Industrial AI with ZERO

The arrival of ZERO marks a paradigm shift in how AI is adopted and utilized across industrial sites.

• Deeper Contextual Understanding: ZERO will continue to evolve to understand even more complex temporal and comparative contexts—such as “a part that has degraded in quality compared to last week” or “a worker’s movement pattern that differs from the usual.”
• A New Model for Human-AI Collaboration: ZERO enables a new kind of work environment where field workers’ experience and intuition are combined with AI’s accuracy and consistency to realize true augmented intelligence.
• More Industry-Specific Modules: ZERO will continue to develop specialized modules that deeply understand the unique characteristics of individual industries such as manufacturing, logistics, and construction—delivering more precise, expert-level solutions and accelerating digital transformation across sectors.
• Predictive Maintenance and Optimization: ZERO will go beyond detecting current issues, evolving into a system that predicts and preemptively addresses problems by analyzing past data in conjunction with the current context. This will lead to minimized downtime and maximized operational efficiency.

Superb AI’s ZERO is an innovative vision AI that instantly solves complex and diverse industrial challenges—with just a prompt. We invite you to join us in shaping the future of vision AI.

Curious how ZERO can transform your industrial site? Fill out the form below, and a Superb AI expert will be in touch shortly.