Korea's AI Race: SKT & LG Unveil Rival 700B Models

South Korea's top AI competitors released rival foundation models this week, setting the stage for a government-backed evaluation. SK Telecom published A.X K2, a 688-billion-parameter model, on July 29. LG AI Research followed with K-EXAONE 2.0, a 750-billion-parameter model, on July 31. Both models use similar designs, including Mixture of Experts architecture and 262,144-token context windows. They also share Apache 2.0 licensing, allowing commercial use and modification. This direct competition comes before evaluators meet from August 8 to 11 to cut the field from four teams to three. What's interesting is that while K-EXAONE 2.0 has 750 billion parameters, only about 37 billion are active during a single response. For A.X K2, around 33 billion parameters are active. This Mixture of Experts design allows models to have a wide range of knowledge while keeping processing costs lower. This competition highlights the rapid advancements in AI and could shape the future of sovereign AI development.