{"id":2593,"date":"2026-01-16T09:11:20","date_gmt":"2026-01-16T00:11:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.sktelecom.com\/en\/?p=2593"},"modified":"2026-01-16T09:11:20","modified_gmt":"2026-01-16T00:11:20","slug":"skt-consortium-advances-to-phase-2-of-sovereign-ai-foundation-model-project","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.sktelecom.com\/en\/2593","title":{"rendered":"SKT Consortium Advances to Phase 2 of Sovereign AI Foundation Model Project"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u2022<\/strong> A.X K1, Korea\u2019s first 500B hyperscale AI model, passes Phase 1 evaluation of Korean government\u2019s \u2018Sovereign AI Foundation Model\u2019 project<\/strong>
\n\u2022 A.X K1 demonstrates superior mathematical and coding capabilities, built for scalability under the Apache 2.0 license<\/strong>
\n\u2022 SKT consortium plans to expand training data, introduce multimodal capabilities, and boost an AI ecosystem in Korea<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

SK Telecom (NYSE: SKM) announced that the SKT consortium has successfully passed the Phase 1 evaluation of the government-led \u2018Sovereign AI Foundation Model\u2019 project, advancing to Phase 2 where four teams will compete.<\/p>\n

The consortium\u2019s model, A.X K1, drew attention as Korea\u2019s first hyperscale AI model with 519B parameters in total.<\/p>\n

Compared with global open-source models of similar active parameter size such as DeepSeek-V3.1, A.X K1 delivered comparable or superior performance in areas of mathematics (AIME25 Benchmark) and coding (LiveCodeBench).<\/p>\n

In particular, A.X K1 scored 9.2 out of 10 in the Phase 1 NIA benchmark evaluation, tying for first place with LG AI Research among the five consortia. The NIA benchmark is a national standard evaluation framework established by the National Information Society Agency (NIA) to objectively compare and verify the performance of AI models, comprehensively assessing capabilities such as mathematics, knowledge, long-form comprehension, reliability, and safety.<\/p>\n

A.X K1 is also distinguished by its high scalability, as it is released under the Apache 2.0 license. Models developed under this license can be freely used for commercial purposes, modified and redistributed by anyone.<\/p>\n

Beginning in Phase 2, the SKT consortium plans to sequentially apply multimodal capabilities, starting with image data. For instance, A.X K1 will become capable of recognizing images of academic papers or business documents and generate summaries in text.<\/p>\n

From the second half of this year, the consortium plans to further advance the multimodal capabilities to enable the processing of voice and video data. This will allow the system to move beyond text-only understanding and effectively comprehend and process diverse data types, including images, audio, and video.<\/p>\n

The consortium also plans to significantly expand the overall volume of training data compared to Phase 1 and broaden the range of supported languages to five \u2014 including Korean, English, Chinese, Japanese and Spanish \u2014 further enhancing model performance. Based on these advancements, it intends to release follow-up models, such as the tentatively named A.X K2.<\/p>\n

The consortium consists of eight organizations: SK Telecom, Krafton, 42dot, Rebellions, Liner, SelectStar, Seoul National University and Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology(KAIST). Recently, it has expanded its research scope with the addition of Professor Seo Minjoon\u2019s lab at the KAIST Graduate School of Physical AI and Professor Seo Insuk\u2019s lab at the Department of Mathematical Sciences at Seoul National University.<\/p>\n

In addition, more than 20 organizations \u2014 including SK Group affiliates such as SK Hynix, SK Innovation, SK AX and SK Broadband, as well as the Korea Foundation for Advanced Studies and the Chey Institute for Advanced Studies \u2014 are expected to gradually utilize the SKT consortium\u2019s AI model. Together, they aim to jointly lead innovation across Korea\u2019s AI ecosystem.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u2022 A.X K1, Korea\u2019s first 500B hyperscale AI model, passes Phase 1 evaluation of Korean government\u2019s \u2018Sovereign AI Foundation Model\u2019 project \u2022 A.X K1 demonstrates superior mathematical and coding capabilities, built for scalability under the Apache 2.0 license \u2022 SKT<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2575,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[504,24,497,505,506],"class_list":["post-2593","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-press-release","tag-a-x-k1","tag-ai","tag-skt-consortium","tag-sovereign-ai","tag-sovereign-ai-foundation-model"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.sktelecom.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2593","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.sktelecom.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.sktelecom.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.sktelecom.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.sktelecom.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2593"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/news.sktelecom.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2593\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2595,"href":"https:\/\/news.sktelecom.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2593\/revisions\/2595"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.sktelecom.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2575"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.sktelecom.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2593"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.sktelecom.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2593"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.sktelecom.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2593"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}