15 Teams Including Naver, LG, and Kakao Join the Independent AI Model Project

Final Selection to Be Made by Early August

Leading domestic artificial intelligence (AI) companies and research institutions have simultaneously declared their participation in the "Independent AI Foundation Model Development" project, overseen by the Ministry of Science and ICT. Through this project, the government aims to foster AI models with global competitiveness.

On July 21, the Ministry of Science and ICT announced that a total of 15 consortiums had submitted proposals during the application period, which ran from June 20 to July 21. The purpose of this project is to discover and support top-tier AI foundation models developed with independent domestic technology.

The list of participating teams includes major companies accelerating large language model (LLM) development, such as Naver Cloud, LG AI Research, and Kakao, as well as Upstage, which unveiled "Solar Pro2," KT with "Midum 2.0," and SK Telecom, the developer of "A.Dot X (A.X) 4.0."

Other participants include Konan Technology, which has extensive experience in LLM research; NC AI, which released the open-source model "Barco-Vision 2.0"; and academic institutions such as KAIST.

The Ministry of Science and ICT plans to finalize the selection of the winning teams in early August after document and presentation evaluations. The selected teams will be eligible for continued government support through competitive assessments. The government plans to provide the final elite teams with computing resources equivalent to 1,000 GPUs, as well as large-scale training data and funding to secure outstanding talent.