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

In this article.FKRX300 your favorite stocksCREATE FREE ACCOUNTRyu Young-sang, CEO of South Korean telecoms giant SK Telecom, told CNBC that AI is helping telecoms firms imve efficiency in their networks.Manaure Quintero | Afp | Getty ImagesSouth Korea has tasked some of its biggest companies and mising startups to build a national foundational AI model using mainly domestic nology, in a rare move to keep the country apace with the U.S. and China.The ject will feature South Korean nologies from semiconductors to software, as Seoul looks to create a near self-sufficient AI industry and position itself as an alternative to China and the U.S.The Ministry of Science and ICT (MSIT) for Korea announced that five conia have been selected to develop the models

One is led by SK Telecom, a telecommunications giant in Korea and includes gaming firm Krafton and chip startup Rebellions among other companies.There are other teams led by some of the country's other minent firms including LG and Naver."We are going through an important juncture in terms of our nological development

So Korea, at the national level, is focusing on ensuring that we lay the nical foundation to have our competitiveness," Kim Taeyoon, head of the foundation model office at SK Telecom who also leads the company's conium, told CNBC."Korea has many entities that would excel at creating a big AI industry

And we could ly see the possibility that we are very capable of creating a good AI stack," Kim added.A "stack" refers to various nologies that make up a duct or other nology.South Korea's forteThe initiative aims to draw on the strategic position of some of South Korea's firms and the nology they develop that are crucial to AI.For example, SK Hynix makes high-bandwidth memory (HBM) which is critical to Nvidia's ducts

Samsung is also another major memory player

SK Telecom has been expanding its into data centers

While Rebellions, which is part of SKT's conium, is chips designed to handle AI workloads.Samsung, meanwhile, has its own chip manufacturing , also known as foundry."This means the country possesses the entire AI stack, from chips to cloud to AI models, and also benefits from a robust community of advanced AI reers who are actively publishing papers and securing patents," Nick Patience, practice lead for AI at The Futurum Group, told CNBC.Given the intricacies of nology supply chains, no one country can do it alone

The conia will still rely on graphics cessing units (GPUs) from American firm Nvidia which have become the gold standard for training AI models.Meanwhile, SK Telecom will train the models it develops on its own Titan supercomputer, which is made up of Nvidia GPUs, as well as an AI data center the company is with Amazon.AI model roadmapSK Telecom is not new to the AI model game

The company launched a beta version of its first chatbot based on its own large language model in 2022 called "A." which is nounced "A dot." Since then, it has developed more advanced versions of the model and chatbot.SK Telecom's conium plans to release its first model by the end of the year, Kim said

It will be initially focused on the market in South Korea, but could be used globally

Another issue will be getting traction among developers to build upon these models

That has what has made a success of other open-source models, those from Alibaba.SK Telecom's Kim said the goal is to create models that can rival these other companies."Our first goal is to create a very strong state-of-the-art open source model and we already have an example of those open source models which are on par in terms of performance with those large (players) OpenAI or Anthropic," Kim told CNBC.He added that there will be models of different sizes that can be used by different industries.An open-source national AI model could also vide benefits by giving es across the country access to the nology without having to rely on a giant from abroad.Meanwhile, South Korean AI models could be positioned as an alternative to U.S. and Chinese-developed systems."Beyond domestic benefits, a ven sovereign AI model presents significant export potential

Just as Korea excelled in memory chips, this could become a valuable duct for other nations seeking alternatives to U.S. or Chinese systems, strengthening Korea's position in the global AI landscape," Patience said.AI sovereigntyUnderpinning this push from South Korea is the concept of "sovereign AI" that has gained traction with many nations.This is the notion that AI models and services, which governments see as having strategic importance, should be built within a country and run on servers located domestically."All major nations are increasingly concerned AI sovereignty as the US and China vie for AI dominance," The Futurum Group's Patience said."Given AI's growing influence on critical sectors healthcare, finance, defense, and government, countries cannot afford to cede control of their digital intelligence to foreign entities."