Science ministry advances three AI teams to next project stage

The science ministry said it advanced Upstage, SK Telecom and LG AI Research to the next stage of its homegrown AI foundation model project after a second-stage evaluation that incorporated user reviews.

The three were selected from four teams by narrow margins on the combined result, the ministry said. The assessment assigned 40 points to benchmark testing, 35 to expert assessment and 25 to user assessment.

Assessors commended Upstage for its plan to link its results with the Daum portal and Timely platform. Its Solar Open2 model can handle up to one million tokens in a single prompt, equivalent to hundreds of pages of documents, the ministry said. The expert committee called Upstage's collaboration with FuriosaAI's NPU and proof-of-concept deployment in the Daum service "a leading example of combining domestic AI software and hardware ecosystems." SK Telecom was credited with top performance among comparison models in mathematical reasoning and Korean-language tasks, as well as deploying its model in a large commercial service. It also received high marks for providing its A.X K1 model for defense use, demonstrating a manufacturing-specialized agent and staging legal and tax demonstrations. LG AI Research was praised for a strategy to work with global international organizations, its differentiation in agentic AI, and its attention to model reliability and risk management. Its K-EXAONE 2.0 ranked ninth globally in an Artificial Analysis measure of whether models avoid hallucinations, the ministry said. Motif Technologies did not advance; its Motif 3 recorded the highest AAII performance among AI models developed outside the United States and China.

The ministry said all four teams had released their models as open source and that each was listed in Epoch AI's Notable AI Models. The group all recorded scores of at least 31 on the AAII, Artificial Analysis' index of model intelligence and performance, ahead of European and Canadian models.

The ministry plans to expand B200 high-performance GPU support for the three advancing teams to 1,000 GPUs in the second half from 768 in the first half of 2026.