SK Telecom mentioned on Jan. 16 that it has superior to the second section of the government-led “Impartial AI Basis Mannequin” challenge geared toward deciding on a national-level synthetic intelligence (AI) system, and can broaden its proprietary mannequin right into a multimodal platform.
The challenge is a authorities initiative that gives concentrated assist in improvement assets akin to graphics processing items and information to safe AI fashions corresponding to these of worldwide huge tech firms. Within the first-phase analysis, which narrowed the sector from 5 bidders to 3, the SK Telecom-led consortium superior by presenting A.X K1, a mannequin with 519 billion parameters, the biggest of its sort in South Korea.
To organize for the second-phase competitors, SK Telecom plans to broaden the mannequin right into a multimodal system within the second half of this yr. Multimodal AI can perceive and course of not solely textual content but in addition photos, voice and video. The corporate mentioned the expanded mannequin will probably be able to recognizing photos in tutorial papers and enterprise paperwork and summarizing them into textual content. Coaching will even be expanded past Korean and English to 5 languages, together with Chinese language, Japanese and Spanish.
SK Telecom plans to deploy A.X K1 throughout trade and academia in collaboration with greater than 20 companions, together with group associates SK hynix, SK Innovation, SK AX and SK Broadband, in addition to the Korea Basis for Superior Research and the Chey Institute for Superior Research.
A.X K1 has demonstrated efficiency corresponding to world fashions akin to DeepSeek V3.1 in superior arithmetic and coding duties, and recorded prime scores in some benchmarks throughout the first-phase analysis. Krafton, 42dot, Rebellions, Liner, Selectstar, Seoul Nationwide College and the Korea Superior Institute of Science and Know-how are collaborating within the consortium to collectively develop the mannequin.
