Two consortia, led by Naver Cloud and NC AI, have been eliminated from the government-led national artificial intelligence (AI) foundation model project after the first round of evaluation. Ministry of Science and ICT announced the results of the first evaluation on Thursday, revealing that only three teams — LG AI Research, SK Telecom and Upstage — advanced to the second round. The ministry said that Naver Cloud was disqualified for failing to meet the project’s critical requirement for technology originality. After the five consortia unveiled their models last month ahead of the evaluation, some teams faced plagiarism controversies over the use of open-source code and encoders from other models. The ministry explained that the technology's originality was assessed with three criteria: technical, policy and ethical perspectives. Technically, it defined an independent model must be trained end-to-end from scratch with self-developed architectures, data and learning processes, even when open-source tools are used. From a policy and ethical perspective, the model must guarantee sovere