SK Telecom
corporateSK Telecom (KRX: 017670), South Korea's largest mobile carrier, has evolved from a telco into a self-described "Global AI Company" under CEO Ryu Young-sang's AI Pyramid Strategy (AI Infrastructure, AI Transformation, AI Service). Its AI research traces back to the T-Brain lab (2017), which produced foundational Korean NLP models — KoBERT (2019), KoGPT2, and KoBART — that became standard benchmarks for the Korean open-source AI community.
The current research is organized under the A.X (AI Transformation) brand. A.X 3.1 (35B, trained in-house on the TITAN supercomputer) and A.X 4.0 (72B, built on Qwen2.5) target enterprise Korean AI, while A.X 4.0-VL-Light adds vision capabilities. The flagship A.X K1 (Dec 2025, 519B MoE / 33B active, 192+1 experts) is Korea's first 500B-scale model, developed by an 8-member SKT-led consortium with Korean government funding. It uses Multi-Latent Attention and a Think-Fusion architecture for hybrid reasoning/direct modes, achieving 80.2 KMMLU and 89.8 AIME25.
People
- Ryu Young-sang — CEO
- Kim Tae-yoon — Head, Foundation Model Division
- Kim Ji-won — Head, AI Model Lab