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SK Telecom, Nvidia team up on South Korea AI model

SK Telecom said that it is working with Nvidia on A.X K2 under a government project for local AI foundation models.

The partners began working together in 2021, when SK Telecom built its Titan supercomputer with Nvidia A100 GPUs.

Last year, they used the Nvidia NeMo dataset to train A.X K1, which SK Telecom said has 519 billion parameters.

SK Telecom said A.X K2 will also use Nvidia tools and that the companies plan joint research on multimodal and vision language models.

🔗 Source: Chosun Daily

🧠 Food for thought

Implications, context, and why it matters.

A.X K2 sits inside South Korea’s push for AI independence

  • The “Proprietary AI Foundation Model” initiative is a state-led program meant to strengthen South Korea’s industry and AI independence 1.
  • SK Telecom leads a consortium, a group of companies working together, with game developer Krafton plus Rebellions, a South Korean maker of AI inference chips called neural processing units (NPUs), to build a full-stack AI platform 2.
  • The program reviews progress every six months, and only two consortium teams move to the final stage 1.

South Korea wants a tech stack it can build at home

  • SK Telecom aims to build more than AI models. Its plan covers semiconductors through services in one vertically integrated setup 2.
  • The consortium says Rebellions gives it access to homegrown NPUs for faster AI services with lower power use 2.
  • SK Telecom has said it plans to open-source its A.X models for academic research and commercial use, which could help the domestic ecosystem grow 3.

Recent SK Telecom developments

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