SK Telecom (017670), Kakao (035720) and KT (030200) have been selected to run "AI for All," a government project that will provide free artificial intelligence services to the entire population. Ease of use and differentiated service plans were the main criteria in the evaluation. The government plans to sign agreements with the three operators next month and formally launch the service within this year after a beta period.
The Ministry of Science and ICT said on the 28th that it had chosen the SK Telecom, Kakao and KT consortiums as project operators after written and presentation reviews of the six bidders that entered the open call. Six companies — SK Telecom, MKD, ESTsoft, Xenon, Kakao and KT — submitted proposals before the call closed on the 18th.
The ministry said the selected bidders scored highly for proposing general-purpose AI chatbot services that would surpass foreign AI offerings, public AI agents that handle complex application procedures so that citizens do not miss out on benefits, and differentiated specialized services developed with startups.
The SK Telecom consortium, which includes Goodoc, Shinhan Card (032710) and TMAP Mobility, plans to develop a task-executing AI service that handles everything from drawing up a plan to carrying it out and confirming the result from a single request. The service will be available not only through apps and the web but also by phone call and text message, so that older users can access it easily. It will offer conversation and search quality tailored to the context of Korean government services and local daily life.
The KT consortium, joined by Upstage, Musinsa and Zigbang, will develop an AI service that supports information search, comparison and decision-making through to the execution and management of public and specialized services, all within a single conversation. The plan is to make the AI chatbot service available not only on the Daum portal and app but also seamlessly on commerce platforms including Danawa, Musinsa and Zigbang.
The Kakao consortium, made up of LG Uplus and Seoul National University Hospital among others, will build its "AI for All" service around KakaoTalk and phone-based AI as points of contact. Drawing on its in-house AI models, telecom and device infrastructure, and its ability to connect to public systems, it plans to offer AI services that combine expertise in fields such as healthcare, finance, taxation, education, employment and caregiving. The government will provide the three selected operators with a combined 512 B200 GPUs this year and, starting next year, will fund the cost of delivering the service to the entire population through the government budget.
As the government accelerates a range of AI projects, the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) said the same day that it had developed K-Fold, a next-generation bio AI model, under the Ministry of Science and ICT's "AI-specialized foundation model project." The technology is an AI that predicts the structural changes that occur when a protein and a drug bind, helping researchers search for new drug candidates. By eliminating the pre-computation step required for structure prediction, the model raises prediction speed by up to 25 times compared with existing models, the researchers said.
