"Highly Rated for Experience in Designing AI Models with an Independent Architecture"
"Expected to Advance the AI Ecosystem through Expansion into Industrial and Public Sectors"
The Ministry of Science and ICT selected the Motif Technologies consortium as an elite team through an additional call for proposals for the "Independent AI Foundation Model" (Dokpamo) project. Going forward, the ministry plans to swiftly provide Motif Technologies, which was additionally selected, with support such as graphics processing units (GPUs) at a level equivalent to that of the existing teams.
Kim Kyungman, Director of the AI Policy Office at the Ministry of Science and ICT, is announcing the results of the additional call for proposals for the independent AI foundation model project at the Government Complex Seoul in Jongno-gu, Seoul on the 20th. Photo by Yonhap News
The Ministry of Science and ICT announced at a briefing held at Government Complex Seoul on the 20th that it had conducted in-depth evaluations 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 the additional call, was not selected. At the briefing, Kim Kyungman, policy chief of the Artificial Intelligence Policy Office at the Ministry of Science and ICT, explained, "Motif Technologies received high marks for its experience in designing AI models with an independent architecture and for achieving performance capable of competing with world-class models even with relatively few parameters and in a constrained data environment," adding, "Trillion Labs was also evaluated as having a high degree of technological self-reliance in its AI models, but unfortunately it was not ultimately selected as an elite team."
The Motif Technologies consortium includes Motif Technologies, More, Crowdworks, NDOTLIGHT, and many other companies, as well as industry-academia-research organizations such as the industry-academic cooperation foundations of Seoul National University, KAIST, and Hanyang University. The consortium has set a goal of building a world-class independent AI model by starting with a 300 billion (300B)-parameter inference large language model (LLM), then progressively advancing to a 310B-level vision-language model (VLM) and a 320B-level vision-language-action model (VLA). The developed models will be released as commercial open source, with plans to open all areas including weights, code, and optimization libraries.
Kim, the policy chief, said, "We will release all areas from the model to the software as open source, including model weights, code, computation optimization, and libraries, and we will build and integrate a public platform," adding, "By providing free AI services and spreading them across various industrial and public sectors, we expect this to contribute to the development of the AI ecosystem."
The government will provide this elite team with large-scale infrastructure, including 768 units of GPU B200 and budgets for data construction and joint procurement, at the same level of support as the existing elite teams. It also plans to designate them as "K-AI companies" and foster them as national flagship projects. Regarding the pace of the Dokpamo project, Kim noted, "Recently, strong AI models have been emerging one after another, and it is true that we have felt a sense of urgency," and added, "We believe companies will actually accelerate their development, so we will supply more GPUs and data to the existing elite teams as well."
The three existing elite teams - LG AI Research Institute, Upstage, and SK Telecom - will develop their models until the end of June, while Motif Technologies will develop its model until the end of July, competing within the same overall AI model development period. In early August, a staged evaluation will be conducted to review their performance. While maintaining the existing evaluation framework, the government plans to reflect global leaderboard criteria and further subdivide the "independence" category. Kim, the policy chief, said, "We will promptly consult and finalize the criteria for the next stage of evaluation," adding, "We will operate the project in a way that ensures objective and fair evaluation while achieving the goals of the Dokpamo project."
Vice Prime Minister Bae Kyunghoon 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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