The Ministry of Science and ICT has selected the Motif Technologies consortium as an elite team following the results of an additional call for proposals for the “Domestic AI Foundation Model” (Dokpamo) project.
Kim Kyungman, Director of the AI Policy Office at the Ministry of Science and ICT, is announcing the results of the additional call for applications for the independent AI foundation model project at the Government Complex Seoul in Jongno-gu, Seoul, on the 20th. Yonhap News
The Ministry of Science and ICT announced on the 20th at the Government Complex Seoul that it conducted an in-depth evaluation of the consortia that participated in the additional call for the Dokpamo project and selected Motif Technologies. The Trillion Labs consortium, which also applied in this additional call, was not selected. The ministry explained, “We were able to concretely confirm their goals and commitment, such as aiming to develop a globally competitive, scalable AI model,” adding, “They possess experience in independently proposing and implementing numerous core modules, and have developed proprietary foundation models in the areas of text, images, and video, which led us to assess that their level of technological internalization is high.”
The Motif Technologies consortium includes Motif Technologies, as well as More, Crowdworks, NdotLight, the industry-academia cooperation foundations of Seoul National University, KAIST, and Hanyang University, along with many other industry-academia-research institutions and companies. The consortium has presented a goal of building a world-class domestic AI model by gradually advancing from a 300 billion (300B)-parameter inference-focused large language model (LLM), to a 310B-parameter vision-language model (VLM), and then to a 320B-parameter vision-language-action model (VLA). The developed models will be released as commercial open source, and the entire stack, including weights, code, and optimization libraries, will be opened.
The government will provide this elite team with large-scale infrastructure at the same level as the existing elite teams, including 768 units of B200 graphics processing units (GPUs), as well as budgetary support for data construction and joint procurement. It also plans to designate them as a “K-AI company” and foster the project as a national flagship initiative.
The three existing elite teams - LG AI Research, Upstage, and SK Telecom - are scheduled to continue development until the end of June, while Motif Technologies will develop until the end of July, competing within the same overall AI model development period. Subsequently, in early August, the government will conduct a stage-by-stage evaluation to review the outcomes. While maintaining the existing evaluation framework, it plans to reflect global leaderboard standards and further segment the “originality” category.
Vice Minister Bae Kyunghun stated, “Major big tech companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic were not globally recognized organizations from the very beginning,” and added, “We will continue to provide policy support so that the domestic AI ecosystem can grow through bold challenges.”
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