SK Telecom Co Ltd (SKM) on Monday unveiled A.X K1, Korea's first hyperscale artificial intelligence model with 519 billion parameters, a key step in the country's push to become one of the world's top three AI powers alongside the United States and China.
The model is designed as a "teacher model," enabling knowledge transfer to smaller and specialized AI systems and forming the foundation of a full-stack AI ecosystem spanning semiconductors, data centers, models and services. SK Telecom said models at the 500B-plus scale deliver more stable performance in complex reasoning, multilingual understanding and advanced coding tasks.
The company plans to make A.X K1 widely accessible through its A. (A-DoT) service, which has more than 10 million users, under an "AI for Everyone" initiative. The model is also expected to support industrial applications, including manufacturing solutions, autonomous game characters and humanoid robots.
A.X K1 was developed by an SK Telecom-led consortium that includes Krafton, 42dot, Rebellions, Liner, SelectStar, Seoul National University and KAIST. SK Telecom said it plans to release the model as open source and provide APIs to accelerate AI development across Korea's ecosystem.
"This marks a new inflection point in Korea's journey toward becoming one of the world's top three AI nations amid intensifying global competition," said Kim Tae-yoon, Head of Foundation Model Office at SK Telecom.
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