Prof. Jaeho Lee from the Department of Electrical Engineering at POSTECH has been selected to participate in the “Sovereign AI Foundation Model” project, which aims to build a national-level AI development team in collaboration with NAVER Cloud.

The project selected five teams, including those led by NAVER Cloud, Upstage, SK Telecom, NC AI, and LG AI Research, and will receive government support totaling approximately KRW 200 billion for resources such as GPUs, data infrastructure, and research personnel. Prof. Lee’s research group is the only team from POSTECH participating in this initiative.

The NAVER Cloud consortium, in which Prof. Lee’s group participates, aims to develop a sovereign omni-foundation model that expands public accessibility and supports industrial applications. The project seeks to build a national foundational AI capability that can integrate and generate text, speech, images, and video data, enabling real-time multimodal interaction.

The consortium includes NAVER, Twelve Labs, POSTECH, Seoul National University, KAIST, Korea University, and Hanyang University.

Prof. Lee’s research group will focus on developing model compression and low-cost training techniques to improve the efficiency of the omni foundation model. The collaboration will also include active academic–industry exchange, such as sending student interns to NAVER Cloud.