Research lab
LG Group's AI research institute, developing the EXAONE family of large language models for Korean and multilingual applications.
South Korea's science ministry has earmarked 3.9 trillion won of a 4.7 trillion won AI budget for 10,000 Nvidia Vera Rubin GPUs, a dev.to analysis reports. Whether that buys a usable domestic model depends on who trains on the cluster and who pays for what it produces.
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South Korea will open a fresh contest for 4.7 trillion won ($3.49bn) of proposed frontier AI equity, ending automatic support for its two finalists. The money arrives as equity in a vehicle not yet designed, so the next round is also a fight over who owns it.
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Three consortia will run a free tier with no usage caps on state-supplied hardware, under a rule that Korean models carry at least half the load. The ministry has published neither the cost nor a target for uptake.
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The Korean AI service platform raised 100 billion won in August at a valuation above 1 trillion won, roughly 4.3 times all the money ever invested in it, and is targeting a preliminary review filing next year.
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The memorandum covers a language that did not register in the Hugging Face dataset statistics the World Bank compiled, and the only paying client named for LG's finance model so far is the London Stock Exchange Group.
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The Ministry of Science and ICT has recommended nine research institutes at four large companies as designated employers for the specialized research personnel program, reopening a route into corporate labs that closed in 2013.
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Korea's Dokpamo program gives the benchmarking firm's index 25 of the 100 points that decide which teams advance. In the results published on August 27, the team that led that component finished last of the four.
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SemiAnalysis counts roughly $350m of state money behind five competing Korean foundation-model consortiums, set against a $919bn infrastructure figure. The gap is where the investment case sits, and it points at hardware.
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The Ministry of Science and ICT has picked three consortium leads and set September betas, which hands the market a delivery calendar long before it hands anyone a number worth modelling.
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Upstage, SK Telecom and LG AI Research passed the second-stage evaluation on usability rather than benchmarks. A third stage cuts the field to two as early as year-end.
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Seoul passed Upstage, SK Telecom and LG AI Research on August 18 and eliminated Motif, whose model topped the intelligence index but scored lowest on whether people could use it.
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