Bae Kyung-hoon, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Science and ICT, told a presidential briefing on Thursday at the Cheong Wa Dae that a second round of model evaluations due in August could vault the country beyond its current third-place standing.
A third assessment is scheduled for December, he added.
Pressed by a citizens' panel on whether Korea could match the frontier-class models the United States has moved to restrict, Bae was emphatic.
"I dare say the Republic of Korea can build one too," he said, arguing that the country could reach the highest tier of performance if its computing infrastructure were adequately backed.
The bottleneck, he stressed, is hardware.
Bae said about 10,000 graphics processing units would be enough to compete at that level, but noted that developers of sovereign foundation models had been receiving only 500 B200-class GPUs each, a figure that has since risen to about 735 — still far short of what the race demands.
President Lee Jae Myung threw his weight behind the appeal, comparing years of under-investment to fighting rivals armed with electronic calculators while Korea made do with counting rods. Bae said additional budget for frontier-grade development would hinge on active support from fiscal authorities.
The minister also pledged to release a security-specialized sovereign model within the year, training existing domestic models on additional security data to shore up self-reliance against an uncertain environment in which US access controls could tighten again at any moment.
On physical AI, Bae said the government would develop a general-purpose model while building sector-specific variants in parallel, aiming within three years for a framework that can be deployed on site with as little as 100 to 1,000 hours of data.
Localizing data, models and components, he said, would lay the groundwork for exporting the technology abroad.
Bae unveiled plans for a nationwide service, "AI for All," to launch this year, expanding public AI agents and advancing toward one AI agent per citizen from 2027.
Lee said strong multilingual support could draw middle-income nations into a cooperative bloc, and Bae cast the effort as the basis for a horizontal AI network free of dependence on the US-China duopoly.
Under its "K-Moonshot" project, the ministry will begin work on a quantum computer by 2029, a cancer-focused AI bio model by 2028 and brain-computer interface technology by 2030, while a new "asset-ising failure" scheme, effective this month, will keep funding promising research even when it misses its targets.
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