"DeepSeek? We Lead the Way"... 8,800 Downloads in 4 Days: What Is This Homegrown AI?

SKT: "Large-Scale AI Model Receives Positive Response... 8,800 Downloads in Four Days"
'A.X K1' Unveiled as a 519B-Parameter Large-Scale AI Model
Multimodal Capabilities to Be Added This Year, Expansion to Trillion-Parameter Scale Planned

On January 11, SK Telecom announced that its elite team-developed large-scale AI model, "A.X K1 (A.Dot X K1)," has received positive evaluations both domestically and internationally immediately after its release.

A.X K1 is a large-scale model with 519 billion parameters, developed within a limited period of approximately four months. It has demonstrated performance comparable to or surpassing global AI models such as DeepSeek V3.1 in major benchmarks.

In particular, since the technical report on the A.X K1 model was released on January 7, interest has continued to grow, with the number of model downloads surging to around 8,800 within just four days.

SK Telecom explained, "The main reason for the high level of interest in A.X K1 is its scalability," adding, "On social networking services (SNS) such as LinkedIn and Facebook, the fact that A.X K1 is released under the 'Apache 2.0' license, which allows for free use and distribution, is being highlighted as a key advantage."

Clement Delangue, founder and CEO of the global AI model platform Hugging Face, also directly mentioned A.X K1, citing it as an example of the advancement of Korean AI. Through his LinkedIn account, CEO Delangue recently stated, "While we talk a lot about the United States and China in the field of AI, thanks to open source, every country can become a developer-and should."

Epoch AI, a U.S. nonprofit AI research institute, listed five models from Korea's "independent AI foundation model" project as "notable AI models" from December 29 to 31 last year.

Epoch AI tracks and analyzes the computational capabilities and data trends of AI models, and publishes its "notable AI models" list based on criteria such as the amount of training data, computational efficiency, and technological innovation, selecting models from around the world.

Meanwhile, starting this year, SK Telecom's elite team plans to sequentially add multimodal capabilities to the model and expand it to the trillion-parameter scale through further development. The team's strategy is to ensure that A.X K1 serves as the "digital social overhead capital (SOC)" supporting the national AI ecosystem. Additionally, the team plans to support the growth of various small and specialized models based on A.X K1's knowledge.