NC AI consortium said on Wednesday it will release its proprietary AI foundation model VAETKI as open source on Hugging Face to support AI transformation across domestic industries.

VAETKI positions itself as a vertical AI engine for a major transformation of South Korea’s core industries. The model was developed to match the specific needs and security requirements of industrial sites in areas such as manufacturing, defence, logistics and content. NC AI, which led development, formed a “grand consortium” with 14 industry, academic and research institutions including Lotte Innovate, POSCO DX, MBC, KAIST and the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute, and set up a cooperation framework from data acquisition to real-world validation.

The company said the newly released VAETKI is a large model with more than 100 billion parameters. It applies a mixture-of-experts architecture to improve operational efficiency by activating only the required 11 billion parameters during inference. It also uses NC AI’s enhanced multi-head latent attention technology to cut memory usage by up to 83 percent versus existing models, making it lightweight enough for industrial sites that lack high-cost infrastructure.

The NC AI consortium is conducting validation work through 28 projects across 4 core industry groups. In manufacturing, it is pushing process data analysis and line optimisation. In defence, it is building a meeting-minutes system within a closed on-premises security environment. In logistics, it is proposing a Korea-style smart airport system. In content, it is pursuing the buildout of an “AI producer.”

Starting with this release, the consortium plans to develop a 200B-class model and a large multimodal model that can process integrated inputs such as text and video in 2026. It then set a goal of exporting packaged offerings to global markets such as the Middle East and Southeast Asia in 2027.

NC AI CEO Yeonsu Lee said, “We will make sure that the technological capabilities accumulated in games can become a core engine that raises the competitiveness of real-world industries.” He added, “Going beyond simple model development, we will contribute to helping South Korea’s major industries secure global competitiveness.”