Lim Junghwan, CEO of Motif: "Free from Originality Controversy... Renewed Challenge for Dokpamo with Korean Proprietary Architecture"

Differentiation Through Proprietary Architecture
"The Government Will Set Standards Reflecting Industry Feedback"

Lim Jeonghwan, CEO of Motif Technologies, is being interviewed by The Asia Business Daily on the 21st at Gangnam Building, Seocho-gu, Seoul. Photo by Jo Yongjun

"We are free from the recent controversy over 'originality.' We will take a bold step forward with our own proprietary architecture."

On January 21, Motif Technologies, an artificial intelligence (AI) startup, stated in an interview with The Asia Business Daily, "As a startup, we lack the capital and manpower compared to large corporations, and having experienced rejection once, we were hesitant to participate. However, our unique proprietary architecture set us apart, which motivated us to try again."

Motif Technologies drew attention by being the first among previously eliminated AI teams to announce their intention to participate in the additional call for the 'Independent AI Foundation Model' (Dokpamo) by the Ministry of Science and ICT. Major companies such as Naver Cloud, NC AI, Kakao, and KT have decided not to make another attempt.

CEO Lim said, "Since the government is emphasizing 'originality,' I believed there was still a chance if we tried again," adding, "No matter what specific evaluation method the government decides to release in the future, I am confident we can overcome it."

CEO Lim expressed confidence in the fact that Motif Technologies is the only company in Korea to have developed both a large language model (LLM) and a large multimodal model (LMM) as foundation models. He explained, "For Motif Technologies' LLM, 'Motif 12.7B,' we handled the entire process ourselves, from model construction to data training," adding, "We are developing a proprietary architecture that no other company in the world has attempted."

He emphasized that, rather than simply using the existing transformer structure, the company developed and applied its own 'group-differentiated attention' technology, and newly designed both the attention function, which is the core of intelligence, and the model's architecture itself.

Regarding the current controversy over the standards for 'originality,' he said, "When foreign communities mention Korea's LMMs, they refer to them as large models, not as proprietary architectures," adding, "A new, truly original model must be introduced, so it is understandable that the government faces significant challenges." He continued, "There is only one way to prove 'from scratch,' which means developing everything in-house from the basic stage to completion," explaining, "When developing a model, records are kept, and the only way to verify is to see whether repeating the recorded process yields results similar to the current output."

Im Jeonghwan, CEO of Motif Technologies, is being interviewed by The Asia Business Daily at Gangnam Building in Seocho-gu, Seoul. Photo by Jo Yongjun

However, he also expressed the view that the recent controversy over the use of open source is excessive. For example, just because a phone or laptop uses an NVIDIA chip does not mean it should be called an NVIDIA product. He mentioned, "China's DeepSeek also used attention and transformer technologies but was still recognized for its proprietary architecture, which should be taken into account."

Motif Technologies believes that this renewed attempt could serve as an opportunity to introduce the company to the public. As a subsidiary of the AI company More, Motif Technologies was established in February of last year. While the company name may be unfamiliar, the CEO's credentials are impressive. CEO Lim, who majored in mathematics, earned his bachelor's degree from KAIST and a doctorate from the University of Oxford in the UK. He participated in machine learning development at Samsung Research and also worked as a data scientist at PUBG.

CEO Lim added, "If you look at the global community of researchers and developers, originality is about evaluating unique ideas, and good ideas ultimately lead to strong performance. I expect the government will establish the best standards by carefully considering industry feedback, and I hope the Dokpamo competition will become a platform where various companies can realize their ideas."