SK Telecom

For using a foreign component in a program whose entire purpose isn't using foreign components.

Upstage, SK Telecom, and LG advanced in August.

The field narrows to two finalists by the end of this year or into twenty twenty-seven.

So it's a bake-off with the government as the judge, and the elimination criterion is partly political rather than technical.

It's a legitimate technique and it's cheaper, and it means the model isn't sovereign in the sense the program is asking for.

They said so themselves.

SK Telecom?

AXK two, two days earlier, about six hundred ninety billion total, thirty-three billion active Apache two point O, scores twenty-one.

Which is, which is, which is definitely impressive, and I think we can kinda split these two, and it's interesting.

I think the, the Singtel side of things, token as a service, um, I think is interesting, right? Because we've heard a lot of focus on token metering, selling tokens, a- and it's interesting 'cause I think it also came up at the same time as, uh, a, a launch from, from SKT.

SKT most recently talking about a token gateway.

And what I think is interesting is this whole discussion of token as a service or tokenomics or whatever you wanna call it, uh, is interesting 'cause I think a lot of people think it's all about metering.

But what we see, and we saw that in China, right? In the China cases that everyone talks about, it's one part token metering, but also giving people access to a whole bunch of models, which is also what you see from Singtel, giving people access, sort of helping them to, to control costs, giving them access to models.

What you see from SKT in this token gateway is, is quote unquote, "Like a control center managing AI usage patterns." And so I think we're seeing a bit of a, a, a clarification there on this token as a service, token metering, that it's less just about selling a big bucket of tokets, big bucket of, big bucket of tokens, and more about how you, you manage that for folks.

So I think that's a good, like I, I think that's good because I, we had in our analysis, and, and we can link to it in the show notes, a bunch of concerns about just selling, you know, if this is a new form of metering, how long until you go unlimited on this as well.

So it's good clarification.

The Ministry of Science and ICT selected five elite teams in August twenty twenty-five and gave each of them between five hundred and twelve and a thousand and twenty-four GPUs.

Naver Cloud, Upstage, SK Telecom, NCAI, LG AI Research.

The goal was explicitly to build Korean foundation models trained from scratch.

And then they ran it as an actual competition with eliminations.

They ran it as a competition with eliminations, and the phase two scores were published in August.

SK Telecom seventy point six, Upstage sixty-nine point nine, LG AI Research sixty-nine point O, Motif sixty-five point eight, and Motif was cut.

Those four numbers are within about five points of each other across four multi-hundred billion parameter model programs built by four different companies in one country in one year.

That's a real spread of capability in a small market.

Well, again,

this is why I keep talking about that Bangkok Titans, SK Telecom, 2015 group stage at Worlds.

I mean, that's Worlds, it's different.

But some guy blocks in an Irelia mid pick, which at the time was really aggressive, and it was a skill check champion which not many people played in mid lane, and Faker just locks in the first and only mid lane Olaf pick in top tier pro play of all time.

sadly.

I think basically, I mean, I actually, you know, there was actually a viewer question which we might visit in the future, but like, it really is quite incredible how spaced completely tanks this team.

This team very nearly brought down SK Telecom in one of the playoffs in a best of five.

Remember the, um, You know, doing a Marin, which is intercepting a wave to stop the enemy team ending the game, that is what Marin had to do to save the series versus that team in spring playoffs.

The integration allows clients to approve payments instantly using their face, helping the bank phase out SMS one-time passcodes in line with Central Bank of the UAE security directives.

Crossing over to Asia, South Korea's Interior Ministry has asked mobile carriers SK Telecom, KT, and LG Uplus to drop the word "ID" from their joint pass confirmation service and redesign their app screens.

The move follows a sharp rise in complaints from citizens whose mobile IDs were rejected, with officials looking to prevent the commercial service from being mistaken for the government's official mobile ID.

In, down in Southeast Asia, the Philippine Senate has approved a bill barring anyone under the age of eighteen from creating accounts on high-risk online platforms.

Also, get a data eSIM before you leave.

SK Telecom and KT are the big ones.

LG U Plus is good too.

Buy it at Gimhi Airport.

The process was bureaucratic but straightforward.

I needed a Korean phone number, which I got from SK Telecom at the airport.

These steps are necessary for anyone staying longer than 90 days.

The alien registration card is my lifeline.