LG Electronics Inc. today previewed a series of lightweight laptops that will ship with an onboard small language model.

The company plans to reveal the Gram series, as it’s called, at the CES consumer electronics conference next week.

The flagship device in the new laptop line is the 16-inch Gram Pro 16Z90TS. It can be ordered with chips from Intel Corp.’s Ultra V-Series processor family, better known as Lunar Lake. Chips in the series are geared towards power-efficient laptops with onboard artificial intelligence software.

Each Lunar Lake processors comprises three chiplets: a central processing unit, a neural processing unit for running AI models and a graphics processing unit. The latter module likewise includes circuits optimized for machine learning. According to Intel, the NPU and GPU can together manage up to 115 TOPs, or trillion operations per second, when running AI applications.

The Gram Pro 16Z90TS is the first LG laptop to support Microsoft Corp.’s Copilot+ standard. Introduced in May, it provides laptops that meet certain hardware requirements with access to additional AI features in Windows. There are also a number of cybersecurity enhancements.

The Lunar Lake chip in the Gram Pro 16Z90TS chip is supported by up to 32 gigabytes of LPDDR5X memory, a type of RAM optimized for power-efficient laptops. Customers can also configure the device with two terabytes of flash storage.

The Gram Pro 17Z90TR, the second new laptop that LG debuted today, provides the same memory and flash options. But it swaps the 16-inch display that ships with the Gram Pro 16Z90TS for a larger 17-screen. Additionally, LG is offering a different set of processor options. 

Instead of Lunar Lake, Gram Pro 17Z90TR ships with processors from Intel’s Arrow Lake processor series. The chip series trades off some power-efficiency for higher performance. Additionally, customers can order the laptop with a standalone GeForce RTX4050 graphics card from Nvidia Corp., which is faster than Intel processors’ built-in GPU. 

LG’s new laptop lineup is rounded out by the Gram 16T90TP, a two-in-one laptop that can be used as a tablet, and the entry-level Gram Book. The former device offers similar specifications as the 17-inch 17Z90TR. The Gram Book, in turn, combines a 15.6-inch display with an Intel Core i5 processor, 16 gigabyte of RAM and up to a terabyte of flash storage.

LG will ship the laptops with an AI feature called Time Travel. It’s designed to help users more quickly find web pages, documents and multimedia files they viewed in the past. LG says that the feature doesn’t require an internet connection to work.

Under the hood, Time Travel is powered by an onboard small large model based on the company’s EXAONE series of algorithms. 

The latest iteration of the algorithm lineup, EXAONE 3.5, was open-sourced a few weeks ago by LG’s research unit. It includes four language models with up to 32 billion parameters. All four can process prompts with up to 32,000 tokens, units of data that each contain a few letters or numbers.

LG says that the smallest EXAONE 3.5 model, which includes 2.4 billion parameters, can outperform several similarly-sized algorithms. That includes Llama 3.2 2B and Google LLC’s Gemma 2 2B. Moreover, it has demonstrated higher output quality than Phi-3-small, a language model from Microsoft Corp. that has nearly three times as many parameters.

LG plans to offer Time Travel alongside a second AI-powered feature called Gram Chat Cloud. It uses OpenAI’s GPT-4o large language model to help users browse the web. 

Photo: LG