originality

Feb. 20 (Asia Today) — Motif Technology’s consortium has been selected in an additional call to join South Korea’s government-backed effort to build an “independent” artificial intelligence foundation model, as officials said a second evaluation in August will continue to weigh whether teams meet the project’s originality standard.

The Ministry of Science and ICT said Motif was chosen for its experience designing models with its own architecture and for achieving performance it said could compete with leading global systems despite operating in a limited data environment.

The Motif consortium includes the company, startup More, Seoul National University’s industry-academia cooperation foundation and the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology.

The group plans to build an inference-focused large language model with 300 billion parameters and later expand work into vision-language models and vision-language-action models, the ministry said.

Motif will develop its model from this month through July and then compete in an August stage evaluation against LG AI Research, Upstage and SK Telecom. The ministry said it will extend the development timeline for the existing three teams by one month, setting the deadline at the end of July, and will provide Motif with support comparable to the other teams, including 768 graphics processing units and data.

The August stage evaluation will narrow the field to three teams and will include the originality requirement, officials said. Two teams are to be selected for final support by the end of the year.

Kim Kyung-man, director of the ministry’s AI policy office, said the four teams will discuss how to apply the originality assessment and that more detailed criteria will be developed with input from industry and academia.

The project drew attention last month after Naver Cloud failed to meet the originality requirement in an initial evaluation and NC AI was eliminated after scoring lowest on other criteria, raising questions in some quarters about the program’s momentum.

The ministry said the project’s priority is building a domestic AI ecosystem through teams capable of developing an independent foundation model.

— Reported by Asia Today; translated by UPI

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Original Korean report: https://www.asiatoday.co.kr/kn/view.php?key=20260220010006171