The government has recognized optimization technology for artificial intelligence (AI) models as a national strategic technology. The Ministry of Science and ICT and the Korea Institute of Science & Technology Evaluation and Planning (KISTEP) said on the 18th that through this year's fourth review to confirm national strategic technologies, they determined that Trillion Labs' research and development (R&D) on a "domain-specialized distillation-based small large language model (LLM) mixture-of-experts architecture technology" qualifies as a national strategic technology.
This technology distills data from specific fields—such as medicine, law, science, and administration—into domain-specialized knowledge in a small LLM to create expert models by field, and then combines them in a mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture to improve inference efficiency and performance.
The "national strategic technology confirmation system" is a system under Article 9 of the Special Act on Fostering National Strategic Technologies that verifies whether technologies owned, managed, or under research and development by technology-fostering entities in industry, academia, and research qualify as "national strategic technologies." Corporations confirmed to own or manage national strategic technologies are eligible for special listings for super-gap technologies, and corporations confirmed to own, manage, or be engaged in research and development of national strategic technologies receive benefits such as extra points in the selection of designated military service companies and policy finance support.
Cho Seon-hak, director general of science and technology policy at the Ministry of Science and ICT, said, "At a time when competition for technological supremacy is intensifying, it is time to secure national strategic technologies quickly," and noted, "The government will expand support for promising technology-fostering entities that own, manage, or are engaged in research and development of national strategic technologies, and will continue to identify and support national strategic technologies."