Upstage said on the 8th that it will significantly expand its consortium for the Ministry of Science and ICT's independent AI foundation model project by adding research teams from top global universities and major domestic industry and public partners.
The expansion is a strategic decision ahead of the project's second phase to strengthen global-level model research capabilities and rapidly spread AI transformation (AX) services across industrial sites.
Upstage has already unveiled its independently developed "Solar Open 100B," demonstrating performance competitive with DeepSeek "DeepSeek R1" and OpenAI "GPT-OSS-120B." In this consortium, Stanford University's Choi Yejin and New York University's Cho Kyunghyun newly join, and Upstage plans to advance the model's core technologies through joint research with them and strengthen its global AI competitiveness.
Upstage will also accelerate the spread of AI-specialized services based on "Solar Open." Channel Corporation will develop a customer service (CS) AI agent, and Finda and the Korea Electronics Technology Institute (KETI) will research and promote AI agents specialized for the finance and public sectors.
Upstage CEO Kim Sung-hoon said, "With cooperation from global scholars and the addition of industry partners, development of AI models and the spread of AX will gain speed," adding, "We will do our best for AI technology self-reliance and to activate the ecosystem."