Mobile Carriers Join Forces for "AI for Everyone" Project... Kakao Also Steps In

Project Operators to Be Selected by End of the Month
Official Launch Set for December

The three major mobile carriers—SK Telecom, KT, and LG Uplus—will all participate in the "AI for Everyone" project, which provides AI services to the public free of charge using domestically developed artificial intelligence (AI) models. The government plans to complete the selection of project operators by the end of this month, with the official launch scheduled for December.

On August 19, SK Telecom announced its participation in the "AI for Everyone" project, leveraging its full-stack AI capabilities spanning services, models, and infrastructure. The consortium is joined by 19 companies, covering specialized agents, daily life-oriented services, and collaboration in areas such as AI models, infrastructure, and security. SK Telecom plans to first release an AI chatbot and subsequently evolve it into an AI agent capable of handling actual work tasks. The service will utilize the "A.dot X K2" model, which passed the second-stage evaluation of the company’s proprietary AI foundation model project, allowing simple queries to be processed swiftly with lightweight models and more complex work to be handled by high-performance models.

KT has formed a consortium with 16 companies, including Upstage and Motif Technologies, both of which have prior experience participating in proprietary AI foundation model projects. KT's own AI model "Mit:eum" will be combined with Upstage's "Solar," and Motif Technologies' "Motif" AI models. In the "AI for Everyone" project, KT aims to leverage domestic neural processing units (NPUs) to realize sovereign AI and strengthen domestic AI ecosystem competitiveness. Lee Jinhyung, Senior Vice President and head of KT's AX Business Division, stated, "KT, along with Korea's leading AI companies, is proposing the 'AI for Everyone' project, and we intend to ensure that everyone in the country can easily and reliably benefit from AI." He added, "We will combine the capabilities of Korea's leading AI companies with KT’s telecommunications and AI operations expertise to prepare a stable and trustworthy AI service for Korea."

LG Uplus has joined as a key member of Kakao's consortium. Kakao, which oversees the consortium’s collaboration framework, has included not only LG Uplus but also other major affiliates of the LG Group in the consortium. LG Uplus is responsible for validating large-scale service environments and verifying service quality using its telecommunications expertise. LG AI Research will be in charge of advancing and ensuring the safety of the "K Exaone" AI model, LG Electronics will connect devices within living spaces, and LG CNS will provide its public system data linkage and system integration (SI) expertise.

Kim Se-woong, Leader of AI Synergy Performance at Kakao, said, "This consortium brings together both the intention and the ability to make AI services easily accessible and discoverable by everyone in daily life across the nation."

Meanwhile, ESTsoft has formed a consortium with Megazone, Bidraft, SureSoftTech, WiseNut, East Aid, Polaris Office, and the Korea Productivity Center. MKD and Xenon will participate independently, not as part of a consortium. Naver Cloud and Naver, both considered strong candidates, have decided not to participate in the "AI for Everyone" project.

"AI for Everyone" is a project led by private companies with experience developing public services, aiming to provide AI services tailored to public demand, entirely free of charge nationwide. Selected companies will receive support in the form of either 256 or 128 of NVIDIA's latest B200 graphics processing units (GPUs).

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.