South Korea to launch national AI model in race with U.S. and China
South Korean Telecom giant SK Telecom CEO Ryu Young-Sang said that CNBC helps AI’s telecom companies to increase the efficiency in their networks.
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South Korea, some of the largest companies and promising initiatives, with a rare movement to accelerate the country with the United States and China, often commissioned to create a national basic artificial intelligence model using domestic technology.
Since Seoul tries to create a self -sufficient AI industry and position itself as an alternative to China and the United States, it will include South Korean technologies from semiconductors to software.
For Korea, the Ministry of Science and Lice (MSIT) announced that five consortia were selected to develop models. The first is managed by SK Telecom, a telecommunication giant in Korea, and includes chip startup rebellions among the game company Krafton and other companies.
There are other teams led by the country’s other leading companies, including LG and Naver.
“We go through an important intersection in terms of our technological development. Therefore, Korea focuses on ensuring that we set a technical basis to have our competitiveness at national level, at national level.” He said.
Kim Korea has many assets that would be perfect in creating a large AI industry. And we could clearly see our possibility of creating a good pile of AI. “
A “heap” refers to various technologies that make up a product or another technology.
South Korea’s Forte
The initiative aims to use the strategic position of some South Korean companies and the technology that is very important for the AI they develop.
For example, SK Hynix makes the high bandwidth memory (HBM) critical for Nvidia’s products. Samsung is another big memory player. SK Telecom expands its business to data centers. Rebellions, which are part of the SKT’s consortium, develop chips designed to manage AI workloads.
In the meantime, Samsung has its own chip production, also known as Foundry.
“This means that Patience for AI in Futurum Group,” This means that the country has all the AI piles from chips to clouds, AI models, and also means that a solid community consisting of advanced AI researchers actively publishes paper and guaranteed patents. “
Considering the subtleties of technology supply chains, no country can do it alone. Consortia will still trust graphic processing units (GPU) from American company. Nvidia It has become a gold standard to train AI models.
Meanwhile, SK Telecom will train the models developed by his Titan SuperComputer, which consists of NVIDIA GPUs, and an AI data center developed by the company. Amazon.
AI Model Road Map
SK Telecom AI is not new for model game. Company In 2022, he launched the beta version of the first chat boat based on his big language model called “A”. It is pronounced as a “point”. Since then, he has developed more advanced versions of Model and Chatbot.
Kim said he plans to publish SK Telecom’s consortium until the end of the year. Initially, it will focus on the market in South Korea, but can be used globally. The model will be open source, that is, it will be free for developers to potentially use and improve with some license requirements.
Any AI model from South Korea’s project will face intense competition from players such as Openai and Anthropics and many of the powerful open -source offers of Chinese companies. Alibaba and Deepseek.
Considering the already proven records of SK Telecom and other companies, it will not be a problem to create AI model.
More challenges will be to provide models that can compete with the Frontier AI laboratories that shed billions of dollars to research and development. Another problem will have attraction to develop these models among developers. This is the success of other open -source models, as in Alibaba.
SK Telecom said that the target is to create models that can compete for these other companies.
Kim, “Our first goal is to create a very powerful open source model and to create a great technology (players) such as Openai or Anthropic, which is equal to performance in terms of open source models.” He said.
He added that there will be models of different sizes that can be used by different industries.
A open -source national AI model can provide benefits by providing access to the latest technology to businesses throughout the country without having to rely on a technology giant from abroad.
Meanwhile, South Korean AI models can be positioned as an alternative to systems developed by the United States and China.
“Beyond the inner benefits, a proven dominant AI model offers significant export potential. As is perfect in Korea’s memory chips, this can become a valuable product that seeks alternatives to us or Chinese systems, strengthening Korea’s position in the global AI view.” He said.
AI sovereignty
Supporting this edition from South Korea is the concept of “sovereign AI” that wins with many nations.
This is the idea that the AI models and services, which governments see that they are strategic importance, should be built in a country and work on domestic servers.
“All the great nations, the US and China compete for the dominance of the USA and China is increasingly concerned about the sovereignty.” He said.
“Considering the increasing impact of artificial intelligence on critical sectors such as health, finance, defense and government, countries cannot afford to leave the control of their digital intelligence to foreign organizations.”
