Five teams, including Naver, LG, SK Telecom, NCSoft, and Upstage AI (Upstage), have been selected in the national competition in South Korea to secure world-class proprietary artificial intelligence (AI) models.
The Ministry of Science and Information and Communication Technology (ICT) announced on the afternoon of Monday that it has chosen five elite teams for the Independent AI Foundation Model project: Naver Cloud, LG AI Research Institute, SK Telecom, NC AI, and Upstage.
The evaluation process assessed the teams based on their technological prowess and development experience, the excellence of their development goals, the quality of their development strategies and technologies, and their plans for impact and contributions.
The Ministry explained that all five elite teams have demonstrated high-level capabilities in AI model development. They aim to develop and secure AI foundation models from scratch, aligning with the essence of sovereign AI.
The teams also received high marks for proposing ambitious goals, including high-level open-source policies making AI accessible to all, and scalable models like multimodal and omni models that can integrate and process diverse data.
The Independent AI Foundation Model project is a national initiative aimed at developing a Korean AI model that achieves over 95% of the performance of cutting-edge global AI models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini. It’s part of President Lee Jae-myung’s key pledge of AI for All and a crucial component in realizing the national goal of becoming one of the top three AI powers globally.
The project call, which closed on July 21, attracted 15 consortia. Following a written evaluation, the Ministry shortlisted 10 teams on July 25.
The initial 10 teams included Naver Cloud, Motif Technologies, Upstage, SK Telecom, NC AI, LG AI Research Institute, Kakao, KT, Konan Technology, and Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST).
The five selected teams will receive substantial support: approximately 150 billion KRW (about 108 million USD) for graphic processing units (GPUs), 62.8 billion KRW (about 45 million USD) for data, and 25 billion KRW (about 18 million USD) for talent acquisition.
All five teams applied for data support, while Upstage expressed interest in talent acquisition. SK Telecom and Naver Cloud have been chosen as GPU rental suppliers. Teams including these companies will be excluded from GPU support this year, while the remaining three will receive the necessary GPU assistance.
The selected teams will be officially designated as K-AI Model, K-AI Companies.
The Ministry plans to sign agreements with the five elite teams as early as early August to kickstart the development of the AI foundation model. By year-end, they will conduct a first-stage evaluation in December to narrow the field to four teams based on their progress.
Science and ICT Minister Bae Kyung-hoon praised the skills of the selected teams and the enthusiasm of all participants. He stated that this ambitious project marks the beginning of its AI for All initiative. Further adding that the government is committed to actively supporting the growth of South Korean AI companies and institutions, fostering the expansion of a sovereign AI ecosystem.