Deputy Prime Minister Bae Kyung-hoon, concurrently Minister of Science and ICT, gave a welcome speech at the 'Independent AI Foundation Project' announcement event held at the COEX Auditorium in Gangnam-gu, Seoul, last year. The results of the second evaluation for the government’s independent AI foundation model project, which aims to identify a “national representative artificial intelligence (AI),” are expected as early as this week. In this evaluation, one of the four teams—LG AI Research, SK Telecom, Upstage, and Motif Technologies—will be eliminated. This project, launched in August of last year to reduce reliance on foreign AI models and secure domestically developed “independent AI,” follows a survival-of-the-fittest approach. Originally starting with five teams, Naver Cloud was eliminated in the first evaluation in January for failing to meet originality criteria, while NC AI was dropped due to low overall scores. Motif Technologies later joined through an additional public recruitment, forming the current four-team competition. The four teams have publicly released their second-evaluation models on the open-source platform Hugging Face. Since August 8, a public evaluation panel of 200 people has been directly testing and scoring each model, with the evaluation concluding on the 11th. The Mixture of Experts (MoE) model design, chosen by all four teams, involves embedding hundreds of neural networks called “experts” within the model and activating only a few when a query is received. LG’s