[Edaily Reporter Kim Hyun-ah ] SKTelecom(017670)has passed the second round of evaluation for the Reader AI Foundation Model (DOKPAMO) and has been selected as one of the final three elite teams. The company plans to focus on expanding the use of AI in industry and daily life by leveraging its self-developed AI model, “A.X K2,” and on creating outcomes that the domestic AI ecosystem can utilize collectively.

SKTelecom announced on the 18th that the SKTelecom consortium, which developed A.X K2, has secured a spot in the third round of the “Dokpamo” evaluation, organized by the Ministry of Science and ICT.

A.X K2 is a proprietary AI foundation model developed by SKTelecom. The SKTelecom consortium includes companies such as Selectstar, KRAFTON, FortyTwo.dot, Rebellion, Liner, SK AX, and Technomatrix, as well as academic institutions including Seoul National University and KAIST.

In this evaluation, A.X K2 scored 35 points on the AAII, the comprehensive AI index developed by Artificial Analysis (AA), a global AI model evaluation agency. Among the four models, it ranked third behind Motif3 (47 points) and the Upstage model (37 points), while LG Corp.’s K-ExaOne 2.0 received 31 points.

However, the final rankings from the government’s second-round evaluation—which included the AAII, expert evaluations, and general user evaluations—were not disclosed.

The AAII score accounted for 25 out of the 40 points in the benchmark evaluation for the second round of the Dokpamo evaluation. The remaining 15 points were based on an evaluation by the National Information Society Agency (NIA). In addition to the benchmark evaluation, the final three teams were selected by synthesizing expert evaluations and user evaluations.

SKTelecom plans to use this evaluation as an opportunity to further expand the adoption of its proprietary AI models in industry and daily life. In particular, the company plans to collaborate with consortium member companies and institutions to expand AI services that the public can directly experience, and to focus on developing technologies and outcomes that can be utilized by the domestic AI ecosystem.

SKTelecom has accumulated commercialization experience by applying its A.X series models to actual services and industrial settings. In this “Dokpamo” initiative as well, the company focused not only on model performance but also on enhancing practicality for large-scale commercial services and the potential for industry-specific applications.

The company also devoted significant effort to ensuring data quality and safety. SelectStar, a consortium member specializing in AI data and reliability assessment, oversaw the data segment and was responsible for quality control and verification of the training data.

The company established data quality standards for each stage of model development and assessed the appropriateness of question-answering, visual question-answering (VQA), and syntactic accuracy. It also contributed to ensuring the model’s safety and reliability by conducting quality reviews of the red-team training dataset.

Kim Se-yeop, CEO of SelectStar, stated, “Passing this second evaluation is the result of the SKT consortium members pooling their capabilities in their respective fields,” adding, “As the lead data partner, SelectStar will continue to provide stable support for model refinement based on our accumulated expertise in data construction and quality management.”

He added, “We will continue to advance our data and reliability evaluation technologies so that the technical and data achievements of this project do not remain confined to a specific company but lead to outcomes that can be widely utilized by the domestic AI ecosystem.”

SKTelecom plans to further enhance model performance and expand real-world use cases in the industrial and public sectors during the third evaluation as well.