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ProgrammeGovernmentFrontierSouth KoreaReported

Korea’s sovereign AI project cuts Motif and advances LG, SK Telecom and Upstage

See how this story connects

Source: Edaily

Korea’s science ministry advanced Upstage, SK Telecom and LG AI Research to the third stage of its sovereign AI foundation model project and eliminated Motif Technologies, whose model had the top raw Artificial Analysis score of the four. Each remaining team gets about 1,000 NVIDIA B200 GPUs and a GPU leasing budget of about 40 billion won; the ministry said it is reviewing a restructuring toward frontier-level models.

Why it matters

Korea’s state-backed frontier model will come from LG, SK Telecom or Upstage, and the weighting that cut the top benchmark scorer is under scrutiny.

When
18 Aug 2026
ID
WTA-N-2026-0230
Who
Ministry of Science and ICT, LG AI Research, SK Telecom, Upstage, Motif Technologies; Ryu Je-myung

Summary by wheresthe.ai, from Edaily. We could not open the primary document, so it is marked Reported. Checked against the source on 10 Oct 2026.

Read the original at Edaily

Source copy: download the page as saved on 18 Oct 2026 (PDF). Also held by the Internet Archive.

Next stop on this Storyline: LinkedKorea’s science ministry plans 4.7 trillion won for a sovereign frontier model

Data to measure this

Compare the years before 2026 with the years since in these series. National sources for South Korea come first.

  • OECD.AI: venture capital investments in AI start-upsOECD.AI (data from Preqin)Venture capital invested in AI start-ups by country and industry, with series for generative AI and AI compute start-ups.live · query tool
  • AI Industry SurveySoftware Policy & Research Institute for the Ministry of Science and ICTKorean AI companies’ sales, exports, workforce, investment and obstacles.Years: 2023-2024 · annual · report only · PDF
  • Crunchbase company and funding dataCrunchbase · paidPrivate company profiles, funding rounds and acquisitions.live · api · API

All data for South Korea

Cite this story

WTA-N-2026-0230: “Korea’s sovereign AI project cuts Motif and advances LG, SK Telecom and Upstage.” wheresthe.ai, 18 Aug 2026. https://wheresthe.ai/d/kr-sovereign-ai-second-evaluation-motif-out-2026-08/ (source: Edaily).

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