NC AI Unveils Industry-Specific Multimodal Foundation Model 'Vaetki'

NC AI announced on January 8 that it has unveiled 'Vaetki' (VAETKI), a foundation model for multimodal generation. Vaetki is an artificial intelligence (AI) model developed by NC AI, which is participating as an elite team in the Ministry of Science and ICT's independent AI foundation model project.

NC AI's strategy is to supply AI models optimized for each industry sector through Vaetki. The company aims to go beyond the limitations of general-purpose large language models (LLMs) by optimizing data tailored to each industry, such as physical AI for manufacturing sites, tactical intelligence for the defense sector, and AI for the content industry.

NC AI announced on the 8th that it has unveiled 'VAETKI,' a foundation model for multimodal generation. Photo by NC AI

According to NC AI's own performance evaluation, the Vaetki 100B model (with 100 billion parameters) demonstrated performance equal to or surpassing that of open-source models from global companies, such as OpenAI's GPT OSS and Meta's Llama.

Vaetki showed superior performance in Korean compared to global models. When compared to OpenAI's GPT-OSS-120B series, which has a similar number of parameters, Vaetki achieved an average of 101% better performance across three major Korean language benchmarks. In addition, for major global benchmarks outside of Korean, Vaetki outperformed Meta's Llama 4 Scout by approximately 1.9 times on average.

Vaetki's strengths are 'efficiency' and 'scalability' for industrial adoption. To enhance operational efficiency while increasing the model size, Vaetki adopted a Mixture of Experts (MoE) architecture.

Furthermore, by combining next-generation technologies such as Multi-Latent Attention (MLA) and Local-Global Interleaving, Vaetki reduced KV cache memory usage by about 83% compared to conventional methods. As a result, the company explained that this can lower AI infrastructure operating costs for businesses.

In addition, to meet various market demands, NC AI introduced models in a range of sizes, including an ultra-high-performance 100B model, a general-purpose 20B model, and a 7B model for on-device applications.

Based on these achievements, Vaetki has been listed among the 'Notable AI Models' by EpochAI, a U.S. non-profit research institute. EpochAI is a U.S.-based non-profit organization that tracks and analyzes AI model computational capabilities and data trends, and selects 'Notable AI Models' based on criteria such as the amount of training data, computational efficiency, and technological innovation among AI models worldwide.

Lee Yeonsu, CEO of NC AI, emphasized, "Vaetki will not only catch up with global technologies, but will become a strategic asset that enables Korea's leading industries to use AI as a weapon to lead the global market. Based on our proprietary domain-ops technology, we will build a sovereign AI ecosystem that creates real value in industrial settings."

NC AI announced on the 8th that it has unveiled the multimodal generative foundation model 'VAETKI'. Benchmark results of VAETKI's performance. Provided by NC AI