Kakao's ddmm chatbot crashed a day into beta, denting its vertical AI bet

Kakao is the Korean IT firm behind KakaoTalk, a messenger app with more than 48 million monthly active users.

A Korean-fluent vertical AI built on KoGPT can hold Kakao's home market without fighting OpenAI and the global labs head-on.

On the Q4 2022 earnings call in February 2023, CEO Hong Eun-taek framed the stakes: 'The appearance of ChatGPT will create both opportunities and crises for Kakao. Instead of vying with global companies, we will focus on a vertical AI service utilizing Kakao Brain's KoGPT, which is fluent in Korean.' A vertical AI service was promised by the end of 2023.

Kakao launched ddmm, a ChatGPT-style chatbot built by subsidiary Kakao Brain, in beta in March 2023. Over 12,000 people rushed in — more than Kakao had predicted. Answers were slow (users reported roughly 10-minute waits) and wrong (asked to draw pictures, it pasted website URLs instead). Complaints piled up, and on Monday afternoon, March 20, 2023 — one day after the beta launched — the service went down. Kakao cited unexpectedly high traffic, but industry officials read the suspension as an unplanned retreat and called the company 'amateurish' given KakaoTalk's 48M monthly users. Kakao Brain disclaimed the product: 'we do not guarantee the accuracy and credibility of its answers', which 'could include some inappropriate expressions' — users 'shall take all the responsibility'.

Kakao declined to fight OpenAI head-on, betting Korean fluency through KoGPT would defend its home turf — ddmm was that bet's first consumer test, and it failed in public.

The beta suspended itself within a day: 12,000 users overwhelmed a service owned by a company running a 48M-MAU messenger, which officials read as a planning failure.

Kakao Brain disclaimed the product — no accuracy guarantee, users take all responsibility — an odd posture for a flagship answer to ChatGPT.

Korea's fast ChatGPT adoption (over 30% of surveyed adults) meant the stumble happened on the market Kakao most needed to hold.

Distribution advantage does not cover model quality: 48 million messenger users could not keep a chatbot alive past day one when the answers embarrassed the people who tried them.

As of March 22, 2023, ddmm was suspended with Kakao promising 'a further announcement on our plan to resume the service'. The company said it would integrate its AI technologies into KakaoTalk's email and schedule notification functions toward the 'private secretary' role, and its vertical AI service remained promised by the end of 2023 — with KoGPT's Korean fluency still the claimed differentiator.