> A separate 4.7 trillion won will go toward developing a sovereign AI model with what Lee described as the “world’s highest performance.”

Korean HN users: do you know how credible this is? On one hand, we do see Chinese labs doing very well with limited resources, but on the other hand, many (if not most) "sovereign compute" initiatives worldwide end up as corrupt and/or incompetent failures.

That is a big spend. Hopefully (my last job before retiring was working for a South Korean AI company, so I am rooting for them) they will heavily reuse the research by DeepSeek, etc.

As much as possible countries should have sovereign technology, and as human "sovereign individuals" we should mix local models and public APIs for open models as much and makes sense - case by case.