Jan 16: SK Telecom (NYSE: SKM) announced that the SKT consortium has successfully passed the Phase 1 evaluation of the government-led ‘Sovereign AI Foundation Model’ project, advancing to Phase 2 where four teams will compete. 

The consortium’s model, A.X K1, drew attention as Korea’s first hyperscale AI model with 519B parameters in total. 

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).

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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 — including Korean, English, Chinese, Japanese and Spanish — further enhancing model performance. Based on these advancements, it intends to release follow-up models, such as the tentatively named A.X K2. 

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’s lab at the KAIST Graduate School of Physical AI and Professor Seo Insuk’s lab at the Department of Mathematical Sciences at Seoul National University. 

In addition, more than 20 organizations — 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 — are expected to gradually utilize the SKT consortium’s AI model. Together, they aim to jointly lead innovation across Korea’s AI ecosystem.