South Korea 🇰🇷 is now the clear #3 nation in AI — powered by the Korean National Sovereign AI Initiative there are now multiple Korean AI labs with near frontier intelligence. A key driver of this momentum is the Korean National Sovereign AI Initiative, a government-backed, nationwide competition that incentivizes domestic model development through a multi-stage elimination process. The initiative shortlists national champions, with winners receiving direct government funding and guaranteed access to large-scale GPU capacity. ➤ In August 2025, five organizations were selected: Naver, SK Telecom, LG Group, Upstage, and NC AI ➤ In the most recent round announced last week, the field narrowed to three: LG, SK Telecom, and Upstage. ➤ A fourth finalist is expected to be selected in the coming months as the evaluation process continues Generally, top Korean AI models tend to be open weights, and vary in size ranging from Motif‘s 12.7B Thinking model to LG’s 236B K-EXAONE. Other models, such as Korea Telecom (KT)’s Mi:dm K 2.5 Pro, are proprietary and developed with a focus on business integration with existing KT clients. Overview of major releases: ➤ LG | K-EXAONE - The current leader in the Korean AI race and a shortlisted model in the Korean National Sovereign AI Initiative. K-EXAONE is a 236B open weights model and scores 32 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index. K-EXAONE performs strongly across various intelligence evaluations from scientific reasoning, instruction following, to agentic coding. However, this model has high verbosity, using 100 million tokens to run the Artificial Analysis evaluation suite ➤ Upstage | Solar Open - Another shortlisted model in the Korean National Sovereign AI Initiative. Solar Open is a 100B open-weights model and scores 21 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index. Solar Open performs well in instruction following and has lower hallucination rate compared to peer Korean models ➤ Naver | HyperCLOVA X SEED Think - A 32B open weights reasoning model that scores 24 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index. HyperCLOVA X SEED Think demonstrates strong performance on agentic tool-use workflows and scores highly in the Global MMLU Lite multilingual index for Korean, highlighting its potential usefulness in a primarily Korean language environment ➤ Korea Telecom | Mi:dm K 2.5 Pro - A proprietary reasoning model that scores 23 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index. Mi:dm K 2.5 Pro sees strong performance in agentic tool-use. Mi:dm K 2.5 Pro currently has no publicly available endpoint. Instead, Korea Telecom primarily intends to package this model into product offerings and use this model to serve KT’s clients ➤ Motif | Motif-2-12.7B - A small open weights model that scores 24 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index. Motif-2-12.7B performs well in long-context reasoning and knowledge, but is highly token intensive - using 120 million tokens to run the Artificial Analysis evaluation suite See Artificial Analysis for further details of the Korean models: artificialanalysis.ai/ Join our Discord community to discuss more: discord.gg/92EMmeRH

🇰🇷 LG recently launched EXAONE 4.0 32B - it scores 62 on Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, the highest score for a 32B model yet @LG_AI_Research's EXAONE 4.0 is released in two variants: the 32B hybrid reasoning model we’re reporting benchmarking results for here, and a smaller 1.2B model designed for on-device applications that we have not benchmarked yet. Alongside Upstage's recent Solar Pro 2 release, it's exciting to see Korean AI labs join the US and China near the top of the intelligence charts. Key results: ➤ 🧠 EXAONE 4.0 32B (Reasoning): In reasoning mode, EXAONE 4.0 scores 62 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index. This matches Claude 4 Opus and the new Llama Nemotron Super 49B v1.5 from NVIDIA, and sits only 1 point behind Gemini 2.5 Flash ➤ ⚡ EXAONE 4.0 32B (Non-Reasoning): In non-reasoning mode, EXAONE 4.0 scores 51 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index. It matches Llama 4 Maverick in intelligence despite having only ~1/4th total parameters (although has ~2x the active parameters) ➤ ⚙️ Output tokens and verbosity: In reasoning mode, EXAONE 4.0 used 100M output tokens for the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index. This is higher than some other frontier models, but aligns with recent trends of reasoning models using more output tokens to 'think more' - similar to Llama Nemotron Super 49B v1.5, Grok 4, and Qwen3 235B 2507 Reasoning. In non-reasoning mode, EXAONE 4.0 used 15M tokens - high for a non-reasoner, but not as high as Kimi K2’s 30M. Key details: ➤ Hybrid reasoning: The model offers optionality between 'reasoning' mode and 'non-reasoning' mode ➤ Availability: Hosted by @friendliai currently, and competitively priced (especially compared to proprietary options) by FriendliAI at $1 per 1M input and output tokens ➤ Open weights: EXAONE 4.0 is an open weights model available under the EXAONE AI Model License Agreement 1.2. The license limits commercial use. ➤ Multimodality: Text only input and output ➤ Context window: 131k tokens ➤ Parameters: 32B active and total parameters, available in 16bit and 8bit precision (means the model can be run on a single H100 chip in full precision)