LG EXAONE 4.0, Only 5.9 Months Behind GPT-5... Korea’s AI Technology Joins Global Leaders

LG AI Research’s super-large language model “EXAONE 4.0” has been found to have only a 5.9-month performance gap compared to OpenAI’s latest model, GPT-5, according to a new analysis.

This result suggests that Korea’s AI technology has entered the ranks of global leaders, standing shoulder to shoulder with the United States and China.

Microsoft: “Only 5.9-Month Gap—Korea Surpasses Europe in AI Performance”

According to Microsoft’s AI Diffusion Report released on November 5, the EXAONE 4.0 32B model, with 32 billion parameters, was assessed to be 5.9 months behind GPT-5 in performance.

The evaluation used Microsoft’s proprietary Montier Index, which integrates performance scores across five categories — coding, knowledge, reasoning, instruction following, and information retrieval. The index quantifies how long it would take each country’s representative model to reach the performance of the top model.

EXAONE narrowly trailed China’s DeepSeek V3.1 Terminus (5.3 months) but outperformed European models such as France’s Mistral Medium 1.2 (7 months) and the UK’s Gemma 3 27B Instruct (7.7 months).

Microsoft stated in its report that “Korea is showing one of the fastest rates of AI technology diffusion, following the U.S. and China.”

Vice Minister Bae Kyung-hoon: “Korea Approaching GPT-5 Level”

EXAONE 4.0 was the last major project led by Bae Kyung-hoon, the current Vice Minister of Science and ICT, during his tenure as head of LG AI Research.

The model adopted a new architecture combining sentence understanding and reasoning capabilities and surpassed 1 million cumulative downloads within two months of release.

Vice Minister Bae wrote on social media,

“Korea is now just 5.9 months away from GPT-5-level performance. We have become a country that is no longer falling behind in the global AI race.”

Korea’s AI Infrastructure Ranked 4th Globally — Expansion Still a Challenge

The report also assessed AI infrastructure capacity. Based on data center power capacity, Korea ranked 4th globally with 6.9 gigawatts (GW), tied with Japan.

However, the gap with the EU (11.9 GW) remains significant. Microsoft pointed out that while data centers are a core metric of AI infrastructure, their expansion speed remains the slowest among key indicators.

The findings highlight that EXAONE is more than a domestic AI model — it represents a globally competitive large-scale AI system, signaling Korea’s growing strength in the international AI landscape.

Tech Insider Columnist | tlswnqor@naver.com