KINTEX Opens Its Halls to AI, Robotics Startups for Live Trials

* Editor's note: AI PRISM (Personalized Report & Insight Summarizing Media) is an AI-based personalized news recommendation and summary service developed with support from the Korea Press Foundation. It selects and provides six tailored news items by reader type.

1. AI Catches Fires, Robots Set Up Booths: KINTEX Turns Into a Startup Testbed

- Summary: KINTEX said on the 11th that it is launching proof-of-concept (PoC) trials with three AI and robotics startups. TheKeeper, an automotive and safety management startup, is testing an AI-based early fire-detection solution in the electric-vehicle charging zone of a ground-level parking lot, while Plica is verifying a robot that automates the floor-line marking of exhibition booths that people used to do by hand. Smartian, an Internet of Things (IoT) startup, is trialing an edge-AI safety platform combining a two-way emergency bell, sensors and voice recognition in spaces that are hard to manage around the clock, such as restrooms. The trials involve a total of 210 million won in commercialization funding, at 70 million won per project. Lee Min-woo, CEO of KINTEX, said the effort is meaningful as a mutually beneficial model that applies innovative technology to facility safety and management.

2. K-EXAONE Guards Corporate Security via ALYac

- Summary: EstSecurity, the security subsidiary of ESTsoft (047560.KQ), said on the 11th that it is launching ALYac Agentic EDR, an endpoint detection and response solution integrated with K-EXAONE. The embedded AI agent autonomously handles everything from real-time threat detection to reconstructing attack timelines, recommending responses and writing reports. In-house testing found that the average analysis time per detected attack was cut to around eight seconds, report-writing speed improved more than 60-fold, and 80% of analysis work was automated. EstSecurity sees public-sector and financial institutions, where compliance and data security take priority, as its main customers, and it plans to support environments combined with the neural processing units (NPUs) of FuriosaAI, with which it has signed a partnership.

3. Scattered AI Labs Get 'Standardized' as Industry, Academia and Research Join Forces

- Summary: The Ministry of Science and ICT held the launch ceremony for the Autonomous Laboratory Industry-Academia-Research Council at L Tower in Seocho-gu, Seoul, on the 11th. Jeong Yoo-sung, a professor at Seoul National University, serves as overall chair, while the National AI Research Center for Science (NAIS) and the Korea Basic Science Institute (KBSI) serve as joint secretaries. The council operates in three subcommittees: technology and standards, autonomous laboratory operations by field, and on-site verification at companies. The goal is to resolve the problem that a technology developed at one institution is hard to move to another lab because equipment makers use different communication methods and control programs and experimental data formats are not unified. The government plans to link the council with an AI-native advanced bio autonomous laboratory project, which will invest a total of 49.5 billion won by 2028 to build one general-purpose autonomous laboratory and five specialized ones.

4. KT (030200.KS) Develops AI Efficiency Technology That Needs No Retraining

- Summary: KT has developed HyCal, a next-generation AI technology that improves performance through data calibration rather than model retraining. Developed jointly with Chung-Ang University and the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI), among others, the technology was presented at CVPR 2026, an international AI conference held in the United States this past June. Without fine-tuning or parameter expansion, it processes data within the embedding space already learned inside the model, cutting computing costs such as GPU and memory, and analysts say it is effective in vision-language models (VLMs) that handle data of differing natures, such as medical imaging and satellite imagery. According to Goldman Sachs, global monthly token usage is expected to surge 24-fold, from 5 quadrillion this year to 120 quadrillion in 2030, and KT is reviewing plans to apply the research to a next-generation version of its own AI model, Mi:dm K.

5. Meta Returns to Open AI, Taking Aim at Anthropic and China at Once

- Summary: Meta returned to an open ecosystem on the 10th local time with the release of Muse Glimmer, an open-weight AI model. Muse Glimmer is a small model with 30 billion parameters, designed to run AI agents on a PC or tablet without an internet connection, and Meta said it would also release the weights of its top-tier closed model, Muse Spark 1.2, before long. Mark Zuckerberg, Meta's chief executive, criticized the closed structure centered on Anthropic and OpenAI, arguing that artificial superintelligence (ASI) should be widely distributed rather than concentrated in a single institution. He also urged the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump to ease AI controls, saying regulatory moves must stop for the United States to win the U.S.-China race for AI dominance.

6. 'Food Is the New Growth Engine': The Tasty Evolution of Fashion Platforms

- Summary: Fashion vertical platforms are expanding into food and beverage. W Concept will hold its first "Food Week" late this month, after the transaction value of its food category rose 1,480% in the first half of this year from a year earlier. 29CM logged more than 100 million won in transactions within four hours during a live commerce event with Momos Coffee this past May, and saw its food transaction value rise about 41% and dessert transactions climb 691% in the first half; Ably also strengthened its dessert and bakery offerings, lifting first-half transaction value about 50%. Unlike fashion, which is swayed by seasons and trends and has long purchase cycles, food more easily prompts repeat buying, so the fashion platforms are distancing themselves from large e-commerce players with taste-driven products such as specialty coffee and regional restaurant items.