SK Telecom Releases A.X 4.0 Korean AI Model Open Source

Seoul, South Korea - SK Telecom Co., Ltd. said on Thursday that it has made its Korean-language artificial intelligence model, A.X 4.0, available as open-source software through the Hugging Face platform.

The South Korean telecommunications company released two versions of the large language model: a standard model with 72 billion parameters and a lightweight model with 7 billion parameters, according to a statement.

SK Telecom stated that A.X 4.0 was developed by incorporating Korean language data training into the open-source Qwen2.5 model.

The company said the model was designed for data security and local environment operation.

In company testing, A.X 4.0 scored 78.3 points on the KMMLU benchmark, which measures Korean language understanding, compared with 72.5 points for GPT-4.

On the CLIcK benchmark, which evaluates Korean cultural and linguistic understanding, A.X 4.0 scored 83.5 points compared to GPT-4's 80.2 points, according to SK Telecom.

The company stated that its custom tokenizer enables A.X 4.0 to process Korean text with approximately 33% higher token efficiency than GPT-4 when processing the same Korean sentences.

SK Telecom said it plans to offer A.X 4.0 through on-premises deployment, allowing companies to install the model on their servers.

The company stated that it conducted the training process using its data, without any external connections.

The telecommunications operator stated that it has been using A.X 4.0 in its call summarization service since May and plans to apply the technology to other SK Group services.

SK Telecom stated that the open-source release enables companies to develop derivative models and supports research applications.

The company plans to release a reasoning-focused model later this month, featuring enhanced capabilities in mathematical problem-solving and code development.

SK Telecom also said it plans to update the model to process both images and text simultaneously.

The company said it is developing additional models using a from-scratch approach, similar to its previous A.X 3.0 model, with further releases planned