SKT unveils independently developed 'A.X 3.1'.. Challenges AI national representation with Krafton, FortyTwoDot, etc.

SK Telecom announced on the 24th that it has unveiled its independently built large language model (LLM), A.X 3.1, on the open-source community Hugging Face.
This model, which uses 34 billion (34B) parameters, was built by SKT using a 'from scratch' method, where they conducted all steps including data training. SKT explained that while the previous version, A.X 3.0, focused on Korean conversation performance, A.X 3.1 has significantly improved coding and mathematical performance considering the potential expansion as an inference model.
With this, SKT provides a total of four models as open-source for academic research or commercial use, including two types of A.X 3.1 models (standard and lightweight) built from scratch and two types of A.X 4.0 models based on large-scale learning (CPT·Continual Pre-Training) using existing models. The A.X 3.1 (34B) model showed 88% performance compared to A.X 4.0 in the representative Korean ability evaluation (KMMLU). It was at 90% in Korean and Korean culture evaluations.
Additionally, SKT disclosed the details of the consortium it joined in the 'Independent AI Foundation Model Project' organized by the Ministry of Science and ICT.
The consortium includes various companies such as Krafton, the largest game company in Korea, FortyTwoDot, a leader in mobility data, Rebellion, a manufacturer of inference AI semiconductors (NPU), Liner, an AI agent, and SelectStar, which has technology to ensure data stability of AI models, along with academic representatives from Seoul National University labs and researchers from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST).
Furthermore, among the companies that submitted a letter of intent to use the AI models created by the SKT consortium are SK Hynix, SK Innovation, SK AX, SK Broadband, as well as Moloco (AI advertising), Cemes (manufacturing AI), Gauss Labs (manufacturing AI), and Scatter Lab (emotional AI), which are participating in the K-AI Alliance led by SKT.
The SKT consortium plans to create a new independent foundation model representing Korea based on its independently developed LLM, A.X, and the proprietary LLM and data owned by each participating company. In particular, they aim to develop a super-large AI model that surpasses existing scales. They plan to apply 'omnimodal' technology that can integratively process various forms of data such as text, images, voice, and video. They also plan to pursue innovative new structural research that surpasses the transformer structure, which has become the standard in the AI industry, to secure Korea's unique technological competitiveness in the global AI competition.
Tae-yun Kim, head of SK Telecom's foundation model, said, "By forming a consortium with leading companies in each field, we will create new achievements in the sovereign AI field," and "We plan to introduce innovative AI models by comprehensively considering the domestic AI ecosystem."

solidkjy@fnnews.com Reporter Ja-yun Koo