Musk Praises Korean AI! Upstage's 'Solar Pro 2' Ranks 12th Globally

**Domestic AI Leads Price-Performance Innovation on the Global Stage: Upstage's 'Solar Pro 2' Creates a Sensation** Solar Pro 2, an inference-specialized language model developed by Korean AI startup Upstage, is attracting global attention by achieving remarkable results in global AI performance evaluations. In a comprehensive benchmark by ArtificialAnalysis.ai, an AI analysis specialist, Solar Pro 2 scored 58 points, ranking 12th among 20 major AI models, achieving the feat of being the first Korean model to enter the global top tier. Solar Pro 2's core strengths are its overwhelming price competitiveness and inference capabilities. Its groundbreaking fee of $0.5 per million tokens is approximately one-tenth that of global models with similar performance, enabling a significant reduction in the cost of building large-scale AI services. It is praised for its high practical utility, equipped with a 'Reasoning mode' for complex inference and excellent Korean language processing capabilities. The industry views Solar Pro 2 as a significant milestone in the development of the domestic AI ecosystem and the securing of 'AI sovereignty'. The emergence of this model goes beyond a simple performance announcement; it has sparked a 'David and Goliath' confrontation in the global AI industry. When Artificial Analysis praised Solar Pro 2, comparing it to Claude Sonnet, Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, directly posted a refuting tweet stating, "xAI's Grok is still #1." In response, Upstage CEO Kim Seong-hoon immediately retorted, "Congratulations on Grok's continued #1 position, but it won't last long," adding, "SolarLLM is catching up very, very fast," drawing global attention. CEO Kim's confidence is by no means accidental. Upstage, founded by him, a former head of Naver Clova AI, has proven its technological prowess by sweeping gold medals at the 'AI Olympics' Kaggle competition, surpassing global big tech companies like Amazon and NVIDIA. This is the result of differentiated technological capabilities, including full-stack models covering all AI domains from OCR to LLM, and an architecture for processing complex documents of over 100 pages. Musk's direct reaction is evidence of Solar Pro 2's threatening growth trajectory, acting as immense publicity for Upstage. This public competitive dynamic is expected to go beyond a mere war of words and become a true testing ground for Korea's AI technology. Solar Pro 2, having secured both performance and economic feasibility, is widely anticipated to be a crucial turning point that will further elevate the status of Korean AI in the practical AI market.