SK Telecom (017670.KS) has unveiled 'A.X K2,' its proprietary artificial intelligence (AI) foundation model with enhanced reasoning capabilities. Through this, the company aims to support the AI transformation (AX) of industrial sites and everyday life for the public.
SK Telecom announced on the 29th that it released A.X K2 on the open-source platform Hugging Face. This model is the second hyperscale model released through the government's sovereign AI foundation model project. It is characterized by a focus on strengthening competitiveness against global open-source models by improving the performance of A.X K1. Its parameters also increased from 519 billion to 688 billion.
A.X K2 is designed to select and process only necessary information even in long contexts. Its average performance across 14 domestic and international benchmarks improved by 32.2 percentage points over A.X K1, while evaluations related to long-text comprehension and agents improved by 83.9 percentage points. Its mathematical and scientific reasoning capabilities, as well as Korean knowledge and long-text reasoning capabilities, were also enhanced.
SK Telecom plans to expand the scope of AI application across industries. It is demonstrating manufacturing AI agents at steel manufacturer KG Steel and automotive parts manufacturer Conec, and developed three quantized models tailored to military environments with the Ministry of National Defense. With SK Biopharmaceuticals, it applied AI to the development of targeted treatments for intractable cancer, shortening the initial research period, which normally took one to two years, to five months.
The company has also broadened the scope of its collaboration with startups. It is providing AI models to participants in the 'National AI Competition' and companies participating in the 'Everyone's Challenge AX-LLM,' and plans to participate in the 'Everyone's AI' project in the future. Through a derivative lineup including vision-language models and voice models, it has prepared to respond to various industrial demands. It is also reviewing a plan to use A.X K2 ALM, which can recognize and analyze consultation, meeting, and on-site voices, for call center voice calls.
SK Telecom plans to expand its follow-up model to a trillion-scale parameter size capable of competing with the world's top-tier AI models. Kim Tae-yoon, head of foundation models at SK Telecom, said, "We will continue to apply and develop A.X K2 across various industrial fields to contribute to strengthening national competitiveness."
