FriendliAI Hosts First K-AI Elite Teams Gathering

FriendliAI, an AI inference service company, announced on October 16 of this year that it will host the ‘FriendliAI Seoul Meetup 2025’ at Space Share Samsung Station in Seoul. The event’s theme is ‘The Future of K-AI,’ and four out of the five companies selected by the government as the first K-AI elite teams this year will participate.

This meetup includes participation from LG AI Research Institute, Upstage, NC AI, and SK Telecom, marking the first time since their selection as elite teams that they have gathered together. FriendliAI expressed anticipation that the event will serve as a platform to highlight Korea’s standing in fields such as foundation models, multimodal AI, agent AI, and inference platforms. The elite team speakers also plan to present next-generation AI technologies and industry-specific use cases.

The presentation sessions will feature: ▲FriendliAI CEO Chun Byung-gon – ‘Large-Scale AI Inference in Real-World Services’ ▲LG AI Research Institute Executive Managing Director Lee Jin-sik – ‘Toward Agent AI: The Future of the AI Industry’ ▲ ‘SK Telecom’s Agent AI’ ▲Upstage Chief Technology Officer Lee Hwal-seok – ‘The Present and Future of the AI B2B Market’ ▲NC AI CEO Lee Yeon-su – ‘Multimodal AI: Shaping the Future of the Content Industry.’

FriendliAI is currently a partner in LG AI Research Institute’s K-AI project and specializes in AI inference acceleration and cost reduction. It possesses technology that reduces GPU infrastructure costs by up to 50% or more and offers a convenient AI development and deployment platform. In January of this year, Hugging Face, the world’s largest AI platform, added FriendliAI’s AI deployment solution to its official distribution options for the first time as a startup. In August, it attracted significant attention in the industry by securing a large-scale investment of 2.75 billion Korean won in a seed extension round.

LG AI Research Institute is one of the leading companies in the agentic AI era with its hybrid AI model ‘Exaone 4.0.’ SK Telecom is accelerating its transformation into an AI company through its consumer AI platform ‘Adot’ and internal AI agent ‘Adot Biz.’ Upstage is driving innovation in the enterprise AI market through its self-developed pre-trained large language model (LLM). NC AI is targeting the multimodal AI industry and content market based on over 14 years of development experience. Additionally, the participating companies in this meetup are also major clients of FriendliAI.

The event will begin with an opening address at 6:20 p.m. and proceed with presentations until 8:30 p.m., followed by a networking session. Registration can be found by searching for ‘FriendliAI’ on event platforms Luma, Onoffmix, or EventUs.

FriendliAI CEO Chun Byung-gon stated, “This meetup is a valuable opportunity for five domestic AI-leading companies to gather together,” adding, “We hope it becomes a networking platform where participants can share insights and explore new collaboration opportunities. FriendliAI will do its best to ensure this event serves as a venue for AI idea exchange and advancement.”