The South Korean telecom giant SK Telecom is making a major move in the global AI race, unveiling a new, hyperscale artificial intelligence model with over 500 billion parameters. The model, called A.X K1, is the first of its scale to be developed in Korea and is a clear sign of the country’s ambition to become a top-tier AI leader.
The massive new AI was developed by a consortium of eight different organizations, including the popular game developer Krafton and two of the country’s top universities. With 519 billion parameters—a key measure of an AI’s size and power—A.X K1 is in the same league as some of the most powerful models from global giants like OpenAI and Google.
SK Telecom says the new model will be able to handle complex reasoning and math, and understand multiple languages, with much greater stability than smaller models. It’s also designed to be highly efficient, only activating a fraction of its parameters for most tasks.
Crucially, A.X K1 was designed from the ground up to be a “Korean-first” AI, trained primarily on Korean language data. This will enable it to understand better the country’s unique culture, economy, and history, making it ideal for developing personalized services for the Korean market.
SK Telecom plans to make the new model widely accessible through its popular “A.” AI service with over 10 million subscribers. The company will also open-source the model, giving local companies the tools they need to build their own AI applications.
