SK Telecom made its latest artificial intelligence model available for free download Thursday, escalating competition with global AI leaders as South Korean telecommunications companies race to monetize language technologies.
The carrier released both standard and lightweight versions of A.X 4.0 on Hugging Face, claiming the model demonstrates 33% better efficiency than OpenAI’s GPT-4o when processing Korean text. The standard version contains 72 billion parameters while the smaller variant has 7 billion.
A.X 4.0 scored 78.3 on the Korean Massive Multitask Language Understanding benchmark, surpassing GPT-4o’s 72.5, and achieved 83.5 on the CLIcK cultural understanding test compared to GPT-4o’s 80.2. The model builds on Alibaba’s Qwen2.5 foundation with additional Korean language training data.
The timing appears strategic. Rival KT released its own Korean-optimized Mi:dm 2.0 model on the same day, with 11.5 billion parameters. Both companies are positioning themselves as alternatives to foreign AI providers while addressing data sovereignty concerns through on-premise deployment options.
SK Telecom plans to release a reasoning-focused version later this month featuring enhanced mathematical and coding capabilities. The company has integrated A.X 4.0 into its call summarization services and expects AI-related revenue to reach 25 trillion won ($18.5 billion) by 2028.
Whether Korean language optimization alone can drive meaningful market share remains uncertain as global AI competition intensifies.
