NC AI announced on the 4th that it has been selected as one of the five national representatives for the Ministry of Science and ICT's 'Independent AI Foundation Model' project.
NC AI has accumulated core technologies such as emotional voice synthesis, natural language processing, and 3D vision over the past 14 years, and based on this, it transitioned to an independent corporation earlier this year. The selection was decisively influenced by the internalization of these technologies and the achievements of its self-developed lightweight multimodal AI models, such as 'Barco Large Language Model (LLM)' and 'Barco Vision 2.0.'
Additionally, NC AI has formed a 'Grand Consortium' with 54 industry-academic-research demand institutions, including Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI), Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Seoul National University, LOTTE Innovate, POSCO DX, and NHN. This consortium is a large community encompassing the overall AI industry transition, including the development of independent super-large language models, industry-specific multimodal models, and domain-ops platforms.
Moreover, NC AI is collaborating with NHN and Mobilint to optimize AI semiconductors (NPU) and is also accelerating the demonstration of lightweight AI suited for on-device environments. 'Barco Vision 2.0', released as open source, gained attention from the global AI developer community by exceeding 10,000 downloads within ten days of its release.
Lee Yeon-soo, CEO of NC AI, noted, "This achievement is not solely NC AI's, but is possible because of the collaboration with research institutions and companies. I believe that technology ultimately needs to be safeguarded by people, and only through authentic accumulation can we save the nation and industry." She added, "NC AI will continue to fulfill its mission as a South Korean AI specialized corporation that realizes technological independence, industrial demonstration, and global contribution simultaneously."