NCAI Is Selected for Independent AI Foundation Model, Proves Technology
Aug 05, 2025
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NC AI, NCsoft's AI company, has been recognized for its 14 years of AI research and development.
NCAI was selected as one of the five consortiums in the 'Independent AI Foundation Model' project, in which the government selects national AI companies with the aim of securing both AI sovereignty and industrial competitiveness. Although Krafton joined the consortium led by SK Telecom, NCsoft is the only consortium led by the game company to lead the project.
NC AI, which was in charge of AI research and development in NCsoft for 14 years and was spun off in February, can be said to be in charge of artificial intelligence for the longest time in Korea. NC AI, which has grown into a long-term vision and investment by establishing an independent AI organization inside NCsoft in 2011, long before the word AI received industrial attention, has accumulated technology areas such as emotional voice synthesis technology, game scenario-based natural language processing (NLP), facial motion animation processing, and 3D vision-based robotics research.
NCAI, focusing on its own huge language model (LLM) 'VARCO', has a total of 54 institutions, including 14 domestic industry-academic research companies and institutions, including 14 domestic industry-academic research companies and institutions, including ETRI (Korea Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute), KAIST, Korea University, Seoul National University, Yonsei University, AI Works, POSCO DX, Lotte Innovate, HL Robotics, InterX, MediaGen, MBC, and NHN, and 40 major groups of Lotte and POSCO, united as one goal throughout the entire project cycle. NCAI's 'Grand Consortium' is not a collaboration to create a single technology, but rather a participation of the entire AI ecosystem to protect Korea's digital sovereignty, the company stressed.
The representative models of NCAI are VARCO LLM and VARCO Vision 2.0. In particular, VARCO Vision 2.0 consists of 14 billion and 1.7 billion parameters, and despite its small size, it has outperformed the global equivalent SOTA multimodal model, recording several benchmark top-tier performances, the company said. It has already been demonstrated in fashion, games, smart cities, and manufacturing sites, and in particular, it is a domestic model that cracks the global large AI trend in that it fully supports on-device AI environments that can be processed in real-time on smartphones and PCs.
The tasks set by the NCAI consortium are to develop a foundation model for scalable multimodal generation for industrial AI conversion' Develop a large-scale language foundation model package with the highest global performance of 200B class, develop a package for independent LLM-based integrated multimodal cognitive generation foundation, build a platform and service 'Domain Ops' that supports the industrial spread of independent AI, and develop an industry-specific foundation model for manufacturing, distribution, robots, contents, and public industries.
It also emphasized that it plans to support industrial AI transformation through the connection of the Domain Ops platform business and the B2BSI business, spread the foundation model by maximizing usability and device compatibility through model disclosure and various inference framework and format support, and contribute to the establishment of an AI ecosystem by linking government services to the public based on multimodal recognition and generation technology.
The consortium explained that it actually covers the entire cycle from data collection, preprocessing, pre-learning, algorithm design, industrial application, AI semiconductor (NPU) linkage, open source disclosure, and global commercialization. As the technical general leader of the consortium, NCAI will lead the role of 'AI Hub' that connects the technical strengths of each participating organization and reflects industry feedback in real time.
In addition, it will promote domestic AI NPU-based optimization demonstration through collaboration with NHN and develop edge device demonstration projects such as drones and robots together with NPU startup Mobilint to directly verify the effectiveness of AI transition.
In particular, NCAI said that it is increasing its participation in the global open ecosystem at the same time as its public nature as a national project The open-source release of VARCO Vision 2.0 has recorded more than 10,000 downloads in 10 days, emerging as a 'high-performance lightweight multimodal model' that is noted not only in Korea but also in the global AI developer ecosystem. This is evaluated as an example of simultaneously proving two missions: the possibility of global proliferation of domestic AI technology and securing model reliability.
Starting with the selection of the national team, NCAI announced that it will advance the next-generation VARCO series, develop industrial-specific LLM, advance multimodal AI technology, cooperate with talent training institutions, and expand field-specific AI demonstration in stages.
Lee Yeon-soo, CEO of NCAI, said, `This achievement is not just because of NCAI, but because of the research institutes and companies that have been with us, and I think that technology must be protected by people in the end and that building with sincerity can save the country and industry"NC AI will continue to fulfill its calling as a Korean AI company that realizes technological independence, industrial demonstration, and global contribution at the same time in the future."
This article was translated by Naver AI translator.
