Trillion Labs announced on Tuesday that it will vie for a spot in the government’s Independent Foundation Model project, which aims to select an elite team for developing a national artificial intelligence (AI) representative.
Trillion Labs is an AI startup founded in 2024 by Shin Jae-min, who previously contributed to the development of Naver’s HyperCLOVA X.
The company made waves in September last year when it became the first in South Korea to develop and open-source a large language model (LLM) called Tree-70B, boasting 70 billion parameters.
Despite participating in the Dokkamo project last year as part of the Lunit-led medical AI consortium, Trillion Labs didn’t secure a place among the five elite teams selected.
A spokesperson for Trillion Labs stated that the company plans to make another bid for the elite team selection in the Dokkamo project, this time spearheading its own consortium.
For this renewed attempt, Trillion Labs aims to highlight its from scratch approach. Rather than merely reprocessing existing open-source models or fine-tuning external ones, the company will emphasize its capability to independently execute the entire process, from model design to training.
Since its inception, Trillion Labs has consistently adhered to this development philosophy. The company has built its own architecture design, data collection and refinement processes, and pre-training and post-training pipelines using proprietary technology. These achievements have been shared with the open-source community.
Shin, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Trillion Labs, emphasized the significance of having their technology validated on a global platform. Shin stated the model isn’t just a fine-tuned version of external models, but a truly independent creation born from the unique design capabilities. Having demonstrated the technical prowess through Hugging Face, a platform trusted by developers worldwide, they’re committed to contributing to the global open-source ecosystem, extending the impact far beyond Korea’s borders.