🧬 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 now speaks Gemma 4 — a 26B model that loads in every app, and runs on your PC with no GPU
We're adding a Gemma-4 sibling to POCKET: POCKET-26B, built from Google's Gemma-4-26B-A4B (Apache-2.0). Our flagship POCKET-35B is a Qwen-family MoE and needs a recent llama.cpp; POCKET-26B trades a little size for the thing people kept asking for — it just loads, everywhere, today: Ollama, LM Studio, PocketPal, MLX, any stock llama.cpp. No fork, no bleeding-edge runtime, no CUDA, no cloud.
It's a sparse Mixture-of-Experts (25.2B total, ~4B active per token), so the work per token stays small — a real 26B that generates on a CPU with no graphics card.
Two things make it stand out:
1) Universal compatibility. Gemma 4 is a standard, widely-supported architecture, so POCKET-26B runs on the tools you already have — no waiting for your app to add a new model type.
2) Quality that survives compression. Measured GPQA-Diamond (198 q, greedy): • Full base: 67.7% • POCKET-26B Q4_K_M (17 GB): 67.7% — lossless • POCKET-26B Q2_K (11 GB): 67.2% — near-lossless, at 11 GB
Live, on a CPU-only box (our demo Space — POCKET-26B vs Bonsai-27B, same machine, same stock llama.cpp): POCKET-26B ≈ 19 tok/s vs Bonsai ≈ 6 tok/s → about 3× faster generation, no GPU. (Honest notes: shared CPU box, sequential race; a dedicated machine is faster.)
Where it fits in the family: • POCKET-35B (Qwen MoE) — bigger, top-tier, needs a recent llama.cpp. • POCKET-26B (Gemma 4) — loads in any app, quality-robust when compressed. The demo runs the Q4_K_M build; Q2_K (11 GB) is the smallest footprint. For a true ≤8 GB phone, the 5 GB POCKET-KR (Qwen) is still the pick.