Tools & Platforms

South Korea to launch national AI model in race with U.S. and China

Published

3 weeks ago

August 8, 2025

Ryu Young-sang, CEO of South Korean telecoms giant SK Telecom, told CNBC that AI is helping telecoms firms improve efficiency in their networks.

Manaure Quintero | Afp | Getty Images

South Korea has tasked some of its biggest companies and promising startups to build a national foundational AI model using mainly domestic technology, in a rare move to keep the country apace with the U.S. and China.

The project will feature South Korean technologies from semiconductors to software, as Seoul looks to create a near self-sufficient AI industry and position itself as an alternative to China and the U.S.

The Ministry of Science and ICT (MSIT) for Korea announced that five consortia have been selected to develop the models. One is led by SK Telecom, a telecommunications giant in Korea and includes gaming firm Krafton and chip startup Rebellions among other companies.

There are other teams led by some of the country’s other prominent firms including LG and Naver.

“We are going through an important juncture in terms of our technological development. So Korea, at the national level, is focusing on ensuring that we lay the technical foundation to have our competitiveness,” Kim Taeyoon, head of the foundation model office at SK Telecom who also leads the company’s consortium, told CNBC.

“Korea has many entities that would excel at creating a big AI industry. And we could clearly see the possibility that we are very capable of creating a good AI stack,” Kim added.

A “stack” refers to various technologies that make up a product or other technology.

South Korea’s forte

The initiative aims to draw on the strategic position of some of South Korea’s firms and the technology they develop that are crucial to AI.

For example, SK Hynix makes high-bandwidth memory (HBM) which is critical to Nvidia’s products. Samsung is also another major memory player. SK Telecom has been expanding its business into data centers. While Rebellions, which is part of SKT’s consortium, is developing chips designed to handle AI workloads.

Samsung, meanwhile, has its own chip manufacturing business, also known as foundry.

“This means the country possesses the entire AI stack, from chips to cloud to AI models, and also benefits from a robust community of advanced AI researchers who are actively publishing papers and securing patents,” Nick Patience, practice lead for AI at The Futurum Group, told CNBC.

Given the intricacies of technology supply chains, no one country can do it alone. The consortia will still rely on graphics processing units (GPUs) from American firm Nvidia which have become the gold standard for training AI models.

Meanwhile, SK Telecom will train the models it develops on its own Titan supercomputer, which is made up of Nvidia GPUs, as well as an AI data center the company is developing with Amazon.

AI model roadmap

SK Telecom is not new to the AI model game. The company launched a beta version of its first chatbot based on its own large language model in 2022 called “A.” which is pronounced “A dot.” Since then, it has developed more advanced versions of the model and chatbot.

SK Telecom’s consortium plans to release its first model by the end of the year, Kim said. It will be initially focused on the market in South Korea, but could be used globally. The model will be open-source, meaning it will free for developers to use and build on, potentially with some licensing requirements.

Any AI models coming out of South Korea’s project will face intense competition from players including OpenAI and Anthropic as well as many of the strong open-source offerings out of Chinese firms like Alibaba and DeepSeek.

Creating an AI model won’t be a problem, given SK Telecom and other companies’ already-proven track record in doing so.

The bigger challenge will be putting forward models that can compete with those coming out of frontier AI labs, which are pouring billions of dollars into research and development. Another issue will be getting traction among developers to build upon these models. That has what has made a success of other open-source models, like those from Alibaba.

SK Telecom’s Kim said the goal is to create models that can rival these other companies.

“Our first goal is to create a very strong state-of-the-art open source model and we already have an example of those open source models which are on par in terms of performance with those large tech (players) like OpenAI or Anthropic,” Kim told CNBC.

He added that there will be models of different sizes that can be used by different industries.

An open-source national AI model could also provide benefits by giving businesses across the country access to the latest technology without having to rely on a tech giant from abroad.

Meanwhile, South Korean AI models could be positioned as an alternative to U.S. and Chinese-developed systems.

“Beyond domestic benefits, a proven sovereign AI model presents significant export potential. Just as Korea excelled in memory chips, this could become a valuable product for other nations seeking alternatives to U.S. or Chinese systems, strengthening Korea’s position in the global AI landscape,” Patience said.

AI sovereignty

Underpinning this push from South Korea is the concept of “sovereign AI” that has gained traction with many nations.

This is the notion that AI models and services, which governments see as having strategic importance, should be built within a country and run on servers located domestically.

“All major nations are increasingly concerned about AI sovereignty as the US and China vie for AI dominance,” The Futurum Group’s Patience said.

“Given AI’s growing influence on critical sectors like healthcare, finance, defense, and government, countries cannot afford to cede control of their digital intelligence to foreign entities.”

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Tools & Platforms

Big tech will pull the plug on free AI. Can creatives afford to pay?

Published

20 minutes ago

August 31, 2025

Tom May

Remember when Netflix was eight dollars a month? Now it’s nearly tripled in price, carved into ad-riddled tiers, while free-to-air TV has been gutted into unwatchable dreck. The streaming giants hooked us with cheap content, killed the free alternatives, then cranked up prices once we were trapped.

Well, I reckon we’ll soon be watching the exact same playbook unfold with AI. Except this time, the stakes will be infinitely higher.

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Tools & Platforms

Infinities Technology Faces Revenue Decline Amid Strategic Shift Towards AI

Published

39 minutes ago

August 31, 2025

TipRanks HongKong Auto-Generated Newsdesk

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Infinities Technology International (Cayman) Holding Limited ( (HK:1961) ) has provided an announcement.

Infinities Technology International reported a significant decline in revenue and gross profit for the first half of 2025, with an 85.8% drop in revenue compared to the same period in 2024. This decline is attributed to reduced revenue from its mobile games and digital media businesses, as well as the early-stage development of its AI application services, which have yet to generate substantial profits. Despite these challenges, the company remains focused on its strategic goal of expanding its digital entertainment platform globally, leveraging AI as a core component. The industry outlook is optimistic, with the Chinese government’s recent AI initiative expected to drive significant development and investment opportunities in the sector.

The most recent analyst rating on (HK:1961) stock is a Hold with a HK$0.50 price target. To see the full list of analyst forecasts on Infinities Technology International (Cayman) Holding Limited stock, see the HK:1961 Stock Forecast page.

More about Infinities Technology International (Cayman) Holding Limited

Infinities Technology International (Cayman) Holding Limited operates in the digital entertainment industry, focusing on mobile games, digital media, and gaming product supply. The company is committed to building a diversified digital entertainment service platform with a strong emphasis on artificial intelligence technologies.

Average Trading Volume: 404,103

Technical Sentiment Signal: Sell

Current Market Cap: HK$198.3M

For detailed information about 1961 stock, go to TipRanks’ Stock Analysis page.

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Tools & Platforms

Humans are being hired to make AI slop look less sloppy

Published

1 hour ago

August 31, 2025

Angela Yang

Brands caught using AI have continued to face backlash from consumers. Last month, Guess sparked outcry online when it featured an AI-generated model in an advertisement that appeared in Vogue.

So even outside of any obvious mistakes made by AI tools, some artists say their clients simply want a human touch to distinguish themselves from the growing pool of AI-generated content online.

To Todd Van Linda, an illustrator and comic artist in Florida, AI art is easily discernible, if not by certain telltale inconsistencies in the details, then by the plasticine effect that defines AI-generated images across a range of styles.

“I can look at a piece and not only tell that it’s AI, I can tell you what descriptor they used to generate it,” Van Linda said. “When it comes to, especially, independent authors, they don’t want anything to do with that because it’s so formulaic, it’s obvious. It’s like they stopped off at Walmart to get a bargain cover for their book.”

Authors come to him, he said, because they know that AI-generated art fails to capture the hyperspecific “vibe” of their individual story. Often, his clients can only give him a rough idea of what they want. It’s then Van Linda’s job to decipher their preferences and create something that draws out the exact feeling each client seeks to evoke from their art.

Van Linda said he also gets approached by people who want him to “fix” their AI-generated art, but he avoids those jobs now because he has realized those clients are typically less willing to pay him what he believes his labor is worth.

“There would be more work involved in fixing those images than there would be in starting from a clean sheet of paper and doing it right, because what they have is a mismatched collection of generalities that really don’t follow what they’re trying to do,” he said. “But they’re trying to wedge the square peg into the round hole because they don’t want to spend any more money.”

The low pay from clients who have already cheaped out on AI tools has affected gig workers across industries, including more technical ones like coding. For India-based web and app developer Harsh Kumar, many of his clients say they had already invested much of their budget in “vibe coding” tools that couldn’t deliver the results they wanted.

But others, he said, are realizing that shelling out for a human developer is worth the headaches saved from trying to get an AI assistant to fix its own “crappy code.” Kumar said his clients often bring him vibe-coded websites or apps that resulted in unstable or wholly unusable systems.

His projects have included fixing an AI-powered support chatbot that gave customers inaccurate answers — and sometimes leaked sensitive system details due to poor safety measures — and rebuilding an AI content recommendation system that frequently crashed, gave irrelevant recommendations and exposed sensitive data.

“AI may increase productivity, but it can’t fully replace humans,” Kumar said. “I’m still confident that humans will be required for long-term projects. At the end of the day, humans were the ones who developed AI.”

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