Five elite teams have made it through the final qualifying round of a government project aimed at developing a “national artificial intelligence (AI)” model. This marks the official launch of the government's "sovereign AI" strategy to achieve technological self-sufficiency in AI.

On August 4, the Ministry of Science and ICT said that it had selected five elite teams for its “Independent AI Foundation Model Project,” which are Naver Cloud, Upstage, SK Telecom, NC AI, and LG AI Research. Each company will lead a consortium involving academia, research institutes, and industry partners.

The ministry explained that “the selection was based on a comprehensive evaluation conducted at the end of July, which assessed each team’s technological capabilities, development experience, project goals, development strategies, technical excellence, and expected impact and contribution.”

Previously, in a document review conducted in July, the ministry narrowed the pool from 15 applicant teams down to 10.

Of those 10, Kakao, KT, KAIST, Konan Technology, and Motif Technologies did not make the final cut.

The goal of this initiative is to develop an independent AI foundation model with global competitiveness, reduce reliance on foreign technology, and expand the domestic AI ecosystem.

A foundation model refers to a general-purpose AI model trained on large-scale datasets. The government expects such models to drive the AI Transformation (AX) across various industries in Korea. The target performance is set at 95 percent or more of that of leading global AI models, such as OpenAI’s GPT.

The five selected teams will receive government support in the form of resources essential for developing AI models, including GPUs, data, and talent. By the end of this year, the teams must complete initial development, after which four teams will be chosen through a first-stage evaluation in December. From then until 2027, evaluations will be conducted every six months to ultimately select the final two teams.