🧬 Architecture lineage of Korea's sovereign-AI foundation models — checked with public data
In late July 2026, as Korea released self-developed foundation models competing with DeepSeek and Qwen (e.g. LG K-EXAONE 2.0, 750B), interest grew — including a Zhihu thread with 2.7M+ views (→ https://www.zhihu.com/question/2067512422555029717 ) — over whether these models are trained from scratch or built on foreign open-weights.
Sharing a tool that answers this with public data rather than opinion.
It classifies the public models of 9 Korean organizations that released "self-developed, from-scratch foundation models" on HuggingFace — 3 large enterprises (LG, NAVER, Kakao), 2 telcos (SKT, KT), 2 mid-size firms (NCSOFT, Upstage), 2 startups (Motif, VIDRAFT) — on two axes measured from public config.json + model weights: • Architecture fingerprint — does model_type + (hidden·intermediate·layers) match a foreign open-weight model • Weight fingerprint — embedding similarity (from-scratch vs continued-pretraining)
The results are not uniform. Some models match foreign architectures (Qwen, Llama, …) exactly; others use self-built architectures and weights with no foreign match. Which company/model falls where is shown per model in the Space, along with attention originality, license, and reproducible open-source status.
This is a neutral transparency tool, not an accusation — building foundation models on open-weight bases is a legitimate, industry-standard practice. The exact same yardstick is applied to every model, without exception.
Features a 3D lineage graph, search, EN / 中文 / 한국어, and dark mode. Corrections are welcome via the Community tab.
Verified result: 510.58 TPS at PPL 2.3930 on a single A10G (fw188-ctk49-n64-patchbridge, re-run & VERIFIED). Honest note: on raw TPS there are faster runs (535+), but those went over the PPL bar and didn't verify — what we're proud of is the fastest result that keeps quality.
The recipe is already open, so we explained each piece: sliding-window W188, CTK49 kernel tuning, noprecache (honest, verifiable measurement), and an N64 synthetic warmup bridge that shrinks the public↔private gap (~15 TPS), plus INT4 + MTP K=7 + CUDA-graph capture. One rule: only stack quality-neutral speedups.
📱 POCKET — a 35-billion-parameter model that runs on your iPhone, and on your PC with no GPU
We're releasing POCKET, VIDRAFT's flagship Darwin-36B-Opus compressed for on-device use. No fork, no CUDA, no cloud — it runs on stock llama.cpp. It's a sparse Mixture-of-Experts model (256 experts, only 8 active per token), so the file can be large while the work per token stays small. That's what lets a 35B model run on a phone, and generate fast on a CPU with no graphics card.
Measured (POCKET-35B IQ1_M vs Bonsai-27B Q1_0): • CPU generate (Xeon, 16 threads): 27.0 vs 10.1 tok/s → 2.69× faster • GPU generate (H100): 197 vs 89 tok/s → 2.22× faster • GPU prompt processing (H100): 753 vs 1816 → 0.41× (Bonsai wins this one — MoE prefill wakes every expert, so sparsity stops helping there. We say so.) • Quality (HellaSwag, 400 q): 61.0% vs 60.0% → a tie (confidence intervals overlap)
On a real consumer laptop — MacBook M3 Pro (18 GB) — POCKET wins every axis, prompt processing included: • Metal generate: 25.4 vs 12.8 → 1.99× • CPU generate: 13.8 vs 4.4 → 3.13× • Metal prompt: 240.7 vs 73.4 → 3.28×
One more quiet fact: the same-size, quality-oriented rival Ternary-Bonsai-27B (7.2 GB) fails to load in upstream llama.cpp at all — it needs the PrismML fork. POCKET runs on the tools you already have: LM Studio, Ollama, PocketPal, MLX.