On February 20, at the Seoul Government Building in Jongno-gu, Seoul, Kim Kyung-man, director of the Artificial Intelligence Policy Office of the Ministry of Science, Technology, and Communications, announced the selection of additional independent AI-based model projects. Photo courtesy of Asia Today
February 20th (Asia Today) — Motif Technology’s consortium was selected in an additional call for a South Korean government-backed effort to build an “independent” artificial intelligence infrastructure model, but officials said the team would continue to be reviewed for a second evaluation in August to see if it met the project’s originality standards.
The Ministry of Science and ICT said Motif was chosen because of its experience in designing models with unique architectures and its ability to achieve performance that is said to be competitive with major global systems despite operating in a limited data environment.
The Motif consortium includes the company, startup More, Seoul National University Industry-Academia Cooperation Foundation, and Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology.
The group plans to build a large-scale language model focused on inference with 300 billion parameters, and then expand its research into vision language models and vision language action models, the ministry said.
Motif will develop the model from this month until July and will compete with LG AI Research, Upstage and SK Telecom in the August stage evaluation. The ministry announced it would extend the development schedules of the three existing teams by one month, set a deadline of the end of July, and provide Motif with the same support as the other teams, including 768 graphics processing units and data.
According to people involved, the number of eligible teams will be narrowed down to three during the staged evaluation in August, and requirements for originality will also be included. Two final support teams are expected to be selected by the end of the year.
Kim Kyung-man, director of the ministry’s AI Policy Office, said the four teams will discuss how to apply the originality assessment and develop more detailed standards based on input from industry and academia.
The project gained attention last month after Naver Cloud failed to meet originality requirements in an initial evaluation and NC AI was excluded after scoring poorly on other criteria, leading some to question the program’s momentum.
The ministry said the project’s priority is to build a domestic AI ecosystem through teams that can develop independent foundational models.
— Asia Today reported. Translation by UPI
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Korea original report: https://www.asiatoday.co.kr/kn/view.php?key=20260220010006171
