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ProgrammeGovernmentFrontierSouth KoreaReported

Korea cuts Naver Cloud and NC AI from its national AI model project; LG scores highest

See how this story connects

Source: The Korea TimesAlso reported by Inven Global

South Korea’s Ministry of Science and ICT announced first-round results of its national AI foundation model project on 15 January 2026. LG AI Research (90.2 of 100), SK Telecom and Upstage advanced; Naver Cloud was disqualified for using open-source encoders without retraining them from fresh weights, and NC AI was also eliminated. The ministry said it would recruit one more team for round two.

Why it matters

Korean model developers learned the project’s originality rule is enforced: a team that reused foreign components without retraining lost state GPUs and data.

When
15 Jan 2026
ID
WTA-N-2026-0111
Who
Ministry of Science and ICT, LG AI Research, SK Telecom, Upstage, Naver Cloud, NC AI; Ryu Je-myung

Summary by wheresthe.ai, from The Korea Times and the reporting credited above. We could not open the primary document, so it is marked Reported. Checked against the source on 9 Oct 2026.

Read the original at The Korea Times

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

Next stop on this Storyline: What happened nextKorea’s sovereign AI project cuts Motif and advances LG, SK Telecom and Upstage

Cite this story

WTA-N-2026-0111: “Korea cuts Naver Cloud and NC AI from its national AI model project; LG scores highest.” wheresthe.ai, 15 Jan 2026. https://wheresthe.ai/d/kr-sovereign-ai-first-round-naver-nc-cut-2026-01/ (source: The Korea Times).

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