South Korea has picked three companies to build a national artificial intelligence service, and it is not publishing the marks because the entrants asked it not to
The note sits directly under the list of winners, in smaller type, and it is one line long: the evaluation scores and the ranking are not being published, at the request of the companies that entered.
South Korea's Ministry of Science and ICT said on Friday that it has chosen three consortia to build AI for all, the service it intends every citizen to be able to use. They are led by SK Telecom, Kakao and KT. Six applied. The ministry lists the three in Korean alphabetical order and says so, which is another way of saying it is not telling anyone who came first.
The competition ran in two stages. A written round judged technical suitability as a pass or a fail, on the competitiveness of each bidder's models and services and on its plans for using the graphics processors and running the infrastructure. A presentation round, which included a video demonstration of a prototype, then weighed how convenient the service would be and how each bidder proposed to win users, its plans for quality and safety, and what it would contribute to the wider industry.
What the three get
The state is supplying the compute. The three receive a combined 512 B200 graphics processors this year, and from 2027 the cost of running the service for the whole population comes out of the government budget. The ministry plans to sign agreements during September, put the services through a beta, and launch formally before the end of the year.
Each consortium named the models it will run on. SK Telecom lists A.X K2, Solar Open 2, Motif 3 and K-EXAONE 2.0. Kakao lists Kanana, EXAONE and K-EXAONE 2.0. KT lists Mi:dm K Pro 2.5, Solar Pro 4 and Motif 3. None of the three lists is stated as complete, and two names appear twice across them.
Three different front doors
The bidders are not proposing the same product, and the difference is where they expect people to start.
SK Telecom is building a service that takes an instruction and carries it through, and it will run over telephone and text as well as an app and the web, which the ministry's document ties to older users and to people who do not install things. Its consortium runs to nineteen partners and includes two card issuers, a mobility operator and a tax accountants' computing arm. Kakao is putting the service inside the messenger, with a plan to reach reservations, applications and payment in the same place, and a lighter telephone version with LG Uplus before the year is out. Fourteen partners are listed with it, among them Seoul National University Hospital, a bank and a chip designer. KT is going through the Daum portal and partner shopping and property channels, with sixteen partners including the public broadcaster for education.
