LG AI Research has released K-EXAONE 2.0, a 750-billion-parameter open-weight model that the company says is South Korea’s largest AI system to date. The model went live on Hugging Face on July 31 under the permissive Apache 2.0 license, which allows unrestricted commercial use.

A national project, scaled up

K-EXAONE 2.0 was built under South Korea’s sovereign AI foundation-model program, a government-backed effort to develop domestic large language models. It more than triples the parameter count of K-EXAONE 1.0, which had 236 billion total and 23 billion active parameters. The new model uses a hybrid-attention mixture-of-experts architecture with 256 experts, of which eight activate per token, yielding 37 billion active parameters and a 262,144-token context window.

LG AI Research reported an average score of 70.1 across 24 benchmarks, up from 63.3 for the previous version — an improvement of more than 10%. Coding and agentic-coding scores rose about 30%, with SWE-Bench Verified climbing to 68.2 from 49.4. On long-context retrieval (OpenAI-MRCR), K-EXAONE 2.0 scored 94.4, edging out figures LG cited for Alibaba’s Qwen3.5 (93.0) and DeepSeek’s V4 Pro Max (92.9). Speculative-decoding techniques the company calls MTP and DSpark are said to speed up inference by three to five times.

Lim Woo-hyung, co-head of LG AI Research, said Korean researchers “independently completed the entire development process,” framing the release as evidence the country can compete with frontier labs in the US and China. The model also expands language coverage from six to ten, adding Spanish, German, Vietnamese, French, Italian, Polish and Portuguese alongside Korean, English and Japanese.

Joining a crowded field

The release adds a heavyweight, permissively licensed entrant to an open-weight race that has recently been dominated by Chinese labs — Moonshot AI’s 2.8-trillion-parameter Kimi K3 among them — as well as Meta and Mistral. It also follows South Korea’s broader $880 billion push into AI and semiconductor infrastructure, positioning Seoul as a distinct pole in a market increasingly split between US and Chinese frontier models.