AI startup Motif Technologies issued a press release after being selected as an elite team for the Ministry of Science and ICT-led "independent AI foundation model" project, sharing its plans and strategy.

Motif Technologies formed a "full-stack one-team" consortium involving 17 participating institutions and 12 demand-side institutions and joined the project.

According to the company, Motif Technologies will oversee model design. AI infrastructure software company Moreh will be responsible for large-scale GPU cluster optimisation and distributed inference and lightweighting technologies. Academic partners including KAIST, Hanyang University and Seoul National University will take part in multimodal model design, video quality enhancement and development of data preprocessing automation technologies.

In the data area, CrowdWorks and Mathpresso will build high-quality data. 3D AI specialist NdotLight will generate synthetic vision-language-action (VLA) data for robotics at scale.

The Motif Technologies consortium will pursue not only model development but also applications in industry and the public sector in parallel. It divided application areas into consumer-facing fields, national core infrastructure, national strategic industries and a system to support diffusion across all industries, and designed an AX diffusion structure.

In consumer-facing fields closely linked to daily life, smart home and smart building technology company HDC Labs will apply AI to smart home service demonstrations. Mathpresso and Enuma Korea will push to advance education services.

In national core infrastructure with social value and public interest, the National Heritage Promotion Agency will jointly develop services reflecting Korean cultural identity. Mobirous, a developer of autonomous driving software for agricultural machinery, and Jeonbuk Techno Park will carry out demonstrations of physical AI-based autonomous driving and autonomous work in agricultural and off-road environments.

In national strategic and future industries that will determine future competitiveness, robotics technology company XYZ will proceed with VLA-based robotics applications that can expand from service robots to humanoids. Samil PwC will support the establishment of industry-by-industry AX strategies and global commercialisation, and plans to provide consulting and an execution system to expand into various industries.

Through the project, the Motif Technologies consortium aims to develop a multimodal foundation model covering text, images, video and audio in stages. It aims to expand to physical AI and secure an independent model at a global top level. The developed model will be released as commercial open source and also provided as an AI service for the public, with plans to allow all citizens to enjoy the benefits of generative AI.

Jeong-hwan Lim (임정환), chief executive of Motif Technologies, said, "Despite limited resources, we have proven global competitiveness through an independent design." He added, "If we combine the resources supported in this project with the capabilities of the consortium, I am confident we can deliver results that surpass existing participating teams." Lim said, "By broadening open-sourcing across models and software, we will build a domestic AI ecosystem and create AX success cases across industry and the public sector, contributing to Korea's leap to AI G3."