NC AI has unveiled a proprietary foundation model aimed at driving AI transformation in South Korea’s key industries.

NC AI on Thursday unveiled VAETKI, a scalable multimodal generative foundation model. VAETKI is the result of the Ministry of Science and ICT’s project for a homegrown AI foundation model, and is positioned as a sovereign AI to protect technological sovereignty in an ecosystem led by global big tech firms.

VAETKI was trained on a large corpus of 10 trillion tokens. It allocates 20 percent of its tokenizer vocabulary to Korean and includes a Hangul composition function that can handle archaic language to maximise Korean-language specialisation. In an internal evaluation, it posted average performance that was 101 percent stronger across three major Korean benchmarks than the GPT-OSS-120B series.

It also demonstrated global competitiveness. It delivered 265 percent higher performance in instruction-following ability and 137 percent higher performance in PhD-level reasoning ability than Meta’s Llama 4 Scout. It adopts a “think” structure that shows the model’s logical process in reaching an answer, and is optimised for fields that require high reliability such as defence, manufacturing and finance.

From a business perspective, efficiency is a strength. VAETKI combines a mixture-of-experts architecture with MLA, a next-generation attention technology, to cut KV cache memory use by about 83 percent compared with existing models. This can sharply reduce companies’ AI infrastructure operating costs.

NC AI has built a multi-scale lineup ranging from an ultra-high-performance 100B model to a general-purpose 20B model and a 7B on-device model. The technology has been recognised by being included in the list of “notable AI models” selected by U.S. nonprofit research group Epoch AI.

NC AI Chief Executive Lee Yeon-su said, "VAETKI will be a strategic asset that enables South Korea’s key industries to lead global markets with AI as a weapon." He added, "Based on our proprietary domain-ops capabilities, we will build an ecosystem that creates value in industrial field operations."