SK Telecom announced on January 16 that its elite development team has advanced to Phase 2 of the government-led Independent AI Foundation Model project.
The team’s model, A.X K1, is a 519-billion-parameter large-scale AI system, making it the first domestically developed model in Korea to exceed 500 billion parameters. Since its public release, A.X K1 has drawn significant attention from the industry.
A.X K1 has demonstrated strong competitiveness, particularly in advanced mathematics and coding tasks. In benchmark evaluations such as AIME25, which measures mathematical reasoning, and LiveCodeBench, which assesses coding performance, the model delivered performance on par with or exceeding that of DeepSeek-V3.1, a global open-source model of comparable scale.
In the Phase 1 benchmark evaluation conducted by the National Information Society Agency (NIA), SK Telecom’s elite team scored 9.2 out of 10, tying for first place among five participating teams alongside LG AI Research. The evaluation comprehensively assessed capabilities including mathematics, knowledge, long-context understanding, reliability, and safety.
A.X K1 has also been released under the Apache 2.0 license, allowing commercial use as well as model modification and redistribution, a level of openness that has been positively received by the AI community.
Starting in Phase 2, the team plans to gradually introduce multimodal capabilities, beginning with image data. This will enable tasks such as recognizing images in academic papers or business documents and generating corresponding text summaries.
Later this year, the team aims to further enhance multimodal functionality to process speech and video data. The goal is to evolve A.X K1 beyond text-based understanding into an AI system capable of comprehensively analyzing and integrating images, audio, and video.
To strengthen model competitiveness, the team plans to significantly expand its training data compared with Phase 1 and extend supported languages to five, including Korean, English, Chinese, Japanese, and Spanish.
The elite team comprises eight organizations, including Krafton, 42dot, Rebellions, Liner, Selectstar, Seoul National University, and KAIST. Research capabilities were recently further strengthened with the participation of Professor Minjun Seo’s lab at KAIST Graduate School of AI and Professor Inseok Seo’s lab at Seoul National University’s Department of Mathematical Sciences.
In addition, more than 20 organizations—including SK hynix, SK Innovation, SK Broadband, the Korea Foundation for Advanced Studies, and the Chey Institute for Advanced Studies—plan to sequentially adopt the team’s AI model, contributing to innovation across Korea’s AI ecosystem.
