SK Telecom's first 500B-class ultra-large AI model, 'AX K1', has been quickly gaining attention both domestically and internationally since its release.

This model, developed by SK Telecom's elite team on a scale of 519B in about four months, has proven its technological competitiveness by showing performance comparable to large overseas models such as DeepSeek V3.1 in major global benchmarks.

Since the technical report for AX K1 was released on the 7th, interest in the developer community has also skyrocketed, with downloads exceeding 8,800 in just four days.

In particular, the fact that AX K1 is released under the Apache 2.0 license and can be freely used and distributed is drawing a lot of attention.

On social media, there are also continued comments saying, “This is an example of the scalability of Korean AI.”

Clem Delangue, CEO of global AI open source platform Hugging Face, directly mentioned the AX K1 on his LinkedIn account, saying, “Three Korean models were selected as trend models.”

He positively evaluated Korea's technological leap forward, saying, "Thanks to open source, every country can become an AI developer." Nvidia also reposted the post, supporting the Korean company's achievements.

Epoch AI, a non-profit research institute in the United States, also selected five Korean AI foundation models, including AX K1, as “notable AI models.”

Epoch AI is an organization that rigorously evaluates global AI models based on factors such as learning data size, computational efficiency, and technological innovation. This selection is seen as a case that once again confirms the competitiveness of Korean AI technology.

It is also receiving favorable reviews in the domestic AI industry.

Lee Seung-hyun, Vice President of FortiTumaru, said, “AX K1 has shown value beyond from scratch,” and evaluated that it is at the stage of achieving technological sovereignty in the ‘Sovereign AI Judgment System’ that he proposed.

Overseas developers are also responding, saying, "It's rare for a basic model of this scale to be released," and "It's truly unique that this model was developed from scratch." LinkedIn even noted, "Korea has risen to a position where it can compete directly with the US and China."

SK Telecom's elite team plans to sequentially add multimodal functions to AX K1 starting this year and conduct follow-up development to expand to the scale of unit parameters. The strategy is to develop AX K1 into a digital social overhead capital (SOC) that supports the national AI ecosystem.

Additionally, the goal was presented to strengthen the competitiveness of the entire Korean AI ecosystem by supporting the growth of various small and specialized models based on the AX K1.

The release of the AX K1 is seen as a signal that Korean AI technology is truly making its presence felt on the global stage, and its influence is expected to grow further as multimodal expansion and parameter increase in the future.