Motif Technologies was additionally selected in the consolation round of the "national team AI model project." With this, Motif Technologies will compete with the three elite teams that passed the first evaluation in the previous month: LG AI Research Institute, Upstage, and SK Telecom. The national team AI model project is a core government initiative that concentrates support for resources such as graphics processing units (GPUs) and data, with the goal of building Korea's own independent AI model to rank among the world's top three AI countries.
The Ministry of Science and ICT said on the 20th that, after conducting an in-depth evaluation of Motif Technologies and the Trillion Labs consortium, which participated in the additional call for the independent AI foundation model project, it additionally selected the Motif Technologies elite team. This additional call was conducted after, contrary to the original plan, two of the five elite teams were eliminated at once in the first evaluation held early this year.
Participants in the newly joined consortium include Motif Technologies, More, Crowdworks, Ndotlight, Seoul National University Industry Cooperation Foundation, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Hanyang University Industry Cooperation Foundation, Samil PwC, and Korea Heritage Agency (KHA).
The Motif Technologies elite team said it aims to develop a 300B (300 billion parameters) class inference large language model (LLM) based on independent AI technology. It plans to further advance the model into a 310B-class vision-language model (VLM) and a 320B-class vision-language-action model.
The Motif Technologies elite team said it plans to open source the entire software stack—from models to model weights, code, and compute optimization libraries—to provide free AI services, offer the developed AI models as APIs, and expand the AI ecosystem. It also expressed ambitions to support AI transformation across various industries, including public, finance, manufacturing, defense, pharmaceuticals and biotech, construction, and education.
At a briefing that day, Kim Kyung-man, head of the artificial intelligence policy office at the Ministry of Science and ICT, said, "(Motif Technologies) was highly rated for its experience designing AI models with an independent architecture and for achieving performance competitive with world-class models even with relatively few parameters and in a constrained data environment."
The Ministry of Science and ICT viewed the Motif Technologies elite team as possessing independent AI technology. The ministry said it would hold in-depth discussions on the definition and criteria for AI independence in the second evaluation and announce additional details. Deputy Minister Kim said, "Ultimately, you need to have training data log records that allow you to train from the first model and the ability to fix issues when practical problems occur in the AI model."
As early as the same day, the Ministry of Science and ICT will support the Motif Technologies elite team with what is needed to develop an independent, global-level AI model, including GPUs (B200, 768 units) and data (1.75 billion won for individual data construction and processing, about 10 billion won for joint data procurement and use).
The Ministry of Science and ICT explained that the existing three elite teams will develop AI models from January through the end of June, and the additional elite team will develop from February through the end of July, providing the same AI model development period to all elite teams. The phased evaluation is planned for around early Aug., after all elite teams complete AI model development.
Im Jeong-hwan, CEO of Motif Technologies, said, "Through this project, we will gradually develop a multimodal foundation model that covers text, images, video, and audio, expand it to physical AI, and secure an independent model at the world's highest level," adding, "We will contribute to Korea's leap to AI G3."
Vice Prime Minister Bae Kyung-hoon said, "Major big tech companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic were not large and globally recognized organizations from the start," adding, "We will keep our policy support strong to make our AI ecosystem breathe through everyone's challenges and, through this, build a larger and more competitive Korea AI ecosystem."
Trillion Labs, which applied alongside Motif in the additional recruitment, was eliminated. Trillion Labs said, "We humbly accept the results of this independent foundation model building project," adding, "Even before this project was discussed, we emphasized the importance of developing an independent from-scratch model and had already been quietly walking that path. The result is disappointing, but Trillion Labs' direction does not change."