[Digital Today reporter Daegeon Seok] A 500B-class large language model, A.X K1, developed by a select SK Telecom team, is drawing attention in and outside South Korea. SK Telecom said on Jan. 11 that its A.X K1 recorded more than 8,800 downloads in four days after it released a technical report on Jan. 7.

The company cited scalability as the reason for the strong interest. Posts on social media such as LinkedIn and Facebook cited its Apache 2.0 licence, which allows free use and distribution, as an advantage. A.X K1 was developed over about four months at a scale of 519B. It said the model delivered performance similar to or better than global AI models such as DeepSeek V3.1 on major benchmarks.

Clem Delangue, founder and chief executive of the global AI model platform Hugging Face, wrote on his LinkedIn account on Jan. 8 that 3 South Korean models, including A.X K1, were selected among Hugging Face's popular models. Delangue said, "We talk a lot about the U.S. and China in AI, but thanks to open source, every country can become a developer, and it must."

Nvidia also reposted Delangue's post on LinkedIn, publicly backing South Korean companies' achievements. Epoch AI, a U.S. non-profit AI research organisation, listed 5 models participating in South Korea's independent AI foundation model project among notable AI models from Dec. 29 to 31 last year.

Epoch AI tracks AI models' computing power and data trends and releases a list of notable AI models by selecting models worldwide based on criteria including training data volume, computing efficiency and technological innovation. Lee Seunghyun, a vice president at 42Maru, wrote on his Facebook on Jan. 8, "The A.X K-1 model showed value beyond from-scratch." He explained that applying A.X K1 to a sovereign AI assessment system he proposed showed it corresponds to a stage in which technological sovereignty has been achieved.

SKT's select team will proceed with follow-up development this year by sequentially adding multimodal functions and expanding to parameters in the trillions.

An SKT official said, "The select team's strategy is to enable A.X K1 to be used as 'digital social overhead capital (SOC)' that supports the national AI ecosystem." The official said the company plans to continue supporting various small and specialised models based on A.X K1 so they can grow on A.X K1's knowledge.