SK Telecom's elite team is recruiting research and development interns ahead of the second-stage review of the government's "independent AI foundation" model project.

SKT and Krafton said in recruitment notices on Tuesday they will each hire about 10 AI R&D interns. They plan to select young and capable AI developers who will gain hands-on experience with SKT's elite team.

SKT will choose interns from among students enrolled in master's and doctoral programmes, or degree holders, in AI model-related majors such as computer engineering, electronic engineering and mathematics. The interns will, through late June, the preparation period for the second-stage review, evaluate performance of the elite team's foundation model, A.X K1, and handle related data.

Krafton will recruit interns from among master's and doctoral degree holders in deep learning-related majors or undergraduate students with comparable research capabilities. The selected interns will work for 3 months, conducting multimodal LLM training and preliminary research, and compiling results into technical reports or papers and workshops.

The internship hiring will be conducted on a rolling basis through late June. Those selected will be assigned to practical work sequentially. Recruitment may close early if outstanding talent is secured ahead of schedule.

SKT's elite team has run an internship programme since the first-stage review of the project. It recently held a strategy workshop to prepare systematically for the second-stage review. About 100 people attended the workshop held on Feb. 5 at SKT's headquarters in Euljiro, including officials from SKT and Krafton as well as participating companies and research institutions such as 42dot, Rebellions, Liner, Selectstar, Seoul National University and KAIST.

At the workshop, participants shared development experience for the A.X K1 model, a super-large model with 519 billion parameters, and presented improvement measures for the second-stage review. They also discussed a strategy to spread derivative models with hundreds of millions to tens of billions of parameters across various industrial and research fields.

Kim Tae-yoon (김태윤), head of foundation models at SKT, said, "Through this internship hiring, we aim to provide a foothold for next-generation AI talent to grow at the forefront of cutting-edge technology development." He added, "As young and capable intern developers join the elite team, our development momentum will be strengthened further."