SK Telecom and Naver Cloud are competing for the government's project to develop a cybersecurity-focused artificial intelligence (AI) foundation model.
The Ministry of Science and ICT said on the 26th that two consortia, including SK Telecom and Naver Cloud, submitted proposals in response to the call for teams to join the project.
SK Telecom applied with 13 institutions. Upstage, SK shieldus, SECUI, AhnLab, Igloo Corporation, Raonsecure, Smart M2M, AIM Intelligence, Genians, Piolink, the Korea Information Security Industry Association, the Korea University Office of Research Affairs, and the Soongsil University Office of Research Affairs were listed.
Naver Cloud formed a consortium with 32 corporations and institutions. LG CNS, LG AI Research Institute, LG Uplus and other LG Group affiliates, ESTsecurity Corp., Trillion Labs, Theori Korea, HyperAccel, Korea Aerospace Industries (KAI), Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power Co. (KHNP), the Financial Security Institute, the Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information (KISTI), the Seoul National University Office of Research Affairs, the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), and the Pohang University of Science and Technology Office of Research Affairs joined.
The ministry plans to swiftly conduct suitability reviews of the submitted documents and evaluations by external experts (presentation evaluations) and announce the results in early next month.
The government is pushing the project with the goal of securing independent security AI competitiveness and building an AI-based defense system. The selected consortium will receive 256 graphics processing units (GPUs) based on Nvidia B200 for 10 months to develop a security-specialized AI foundation model by July next year. The plan is to release the development results as open source to spread them across Korea's overall security ecosystem.