South Korea launches national AI model in tech race with U.S. and China

South Korea has tasked immoderate of its biggest companies and promising startups to physique a nationalist foundational AI exemplary utilizing chiefly home technology, successful a uncommon determination to support the state apace with the U.S. and China.

The task volition diagnostic South Korean technologies from semiconductors to software, arsenic Seoul looks to make a adjacent self-sufficient AI manufacture and presumption itself arsenic an alternate to China and the U.S.

The Ministry of Science and ICT (MSIT) for Korea announced that 5 consortia person been selected to make the models. One is led by SK Telecom, a telecommunications elephantine successful Korea and includes gaming steadfast Krafton and chip startup Rebellions among different companies.

There are different teams led by immoderate of the country's different salient firms including LG and Naver.

"We are going done an important juncture successful presumption of our technological development. So Korea, astatine the nationalist level, is focusing connected ensuring that we laic the method instauration to person our competitiveness," Kim Taeyoon, caput of the instauration exemplary bureau astatine SK Telecom who besides leads the company's consortium, told CNBC.

"Korea has galore entities that would excel astatine creating a large AI industry. And we could intelligibly spot the anticipation that we are precise susceptible of creating a bully AI stack," Kim added.

A "stack" refers to assorted technologies that marque up a merchandise oregon different technology.

The inaugural aims to gully connected the strategical presumption of immoderate of South Korea's firms and the exertion they make that are important to AI.

For example, SK Hynix makes high-bandwidth representation (HBM) which is captious to Nvidia's products. Samsung is besides different large representation player. SK Telecom has been expanding its concern into information centers. While Rebellions, which is portion of SKT's consortium, is processing chips designed to grip AI workloads.

Samsung, meanwhile, has its ain spot manufacturing business, besides known arsenic foundry.

"This means the state possesses the full AI stack, from chips to unreality to AI models, and besides benefits from a robust assemblage of precocious AI researchers who are actively publishing papers and securing patents," Nick Patience, signifier pb for AI astatine The Futurum Group, told CNBC.

Given the intricacies of exertion proviso chains, nary 1 state tin bash it alone. The consortia volition inactive trust connected graphics processing units (GPUs) from American steadfast Nvidia which person go the golden modular for grooming AI models.

Meanwhile, SK Telecom volition bid the models it develops connected its ain Titan supercomputer, which is made up of Nvidia GPUs, arsenic good arsenic an AI information halfway the institution is processing with Amazon.

SK Telecom is not caller to the AI exemplary game. The institution launched a beta mentation of its archetypal chatbot based connected its ain ample connection exemplary successful 2022 called "A." which is pronounced "A dot." Since then, it has developed much precocious versions of the exemplary and chatbot.

SK Telecom's consortium plans to merchandise its archetypal exemplary by the extremity of the year, Kim said. It volition beryllium initially focused connected the marketplace successful South Korea, but could beryllium utilized globally. The exemplary volition beryllium open-source, meaning it volition escaped for developers to usage and physique on, perchance with immoderate licensing requirements.

Any AI models coming retired of South Korea's task volition look aggravated contention from players including OpenAI and Anthropic arsenic good arsenic galore of the beardown open-source offerings retired of Chinese firms similar Alibaba and DeepSeek.

Creating an AI exemplary won't beryllium a problem, fixed SK Telecom and different companies' already-proven way grounds successful doing so.

The bigger situation volition beryllium putting guardant models that tin vie with those coming retired of frontier AI labs, which are pouring billions of dollars into probe and development. Another contented volition beryllium getting traction among developers to physique upon these models. That has what has made a occurrence of different open-source models, similar those from Alibaba.

SK Telecom's Kim said the extremity is to make models that tin rival these different companies.

"Our archetypal extremity is to make a precise beardown state-of-the-art unfastened root exemplary and we already person an illustration of those unfastened root models which are connected par successful presumption of show with those ample tech (players) similar OpenAI oregon Anthropic," Kim told CNBC.

He added that determination volition beryllium models of antithetic sizes that tin beryllium utilized by antithetic industries.

An open-source nationalist AI exemplary could besides supply benefits by giving businesses crossed the state entree to the latest exertion without having to trust connected a tech elephantine from abroad.

Meanwhile, South Korean AI models could beryllium positioned arsenic an alternate to U.S. and Chinese-developed systems.

"Beyond home benefits, a proven sovereign AI exemplary presents important export potential. Just arsenic Korea excelled successful representation chips, this could go a invaluable merchandise for different nations seeking alternatives to U.S. oregon Chinese systems, strengthening Korea's presumption successful the planetary AI landscape," Patience said.

Underpinning this propulsion from South Korea is the conception of "sovereign AI" that has gained traction with galore nations.

This is the conception that AI models and services, which governments spot arsenic having strategical importance, should beryllium built wrong a state and tally connected servers located domestically.

"All large nations are progressively acrophobic astir AI sovereignty arsenic the US and China vie for AI dominance," The Futurum Group's Patience said.

"Given AI's increasing power connected captious sectors similar healthcare, finance, defense, and government, countries cannot spend to cede power of their integer quality to overseas entities."