Thus far, American and Chinese AI models were dominating at the top of the model charts, but a new country has thrown its hat into the ring.
South Korean consumer electronics company LG has released the Exaone 4.0 series of AI models. The Exaone 4.0 32B reasoning model is currently placed an impressive 10th in Artificial Analysis’ Intelligence Index, which continues to be led by Grok 4, o3 Pro and Gemini 2.5 Pro. LG’s Exaone model is the only model in the top 10 that’s not from the US or China.
EXAONE 4.0 was released in two variants: a 32B hybrid reasoning model that made it to the benchmarks, and a smaller 1.2B model designed for on-device applications. EXAONE 4.0 32B reasoning scores 62 on the Intelligence Index, equal to Claude 4 Opus Thinking, and only one point behind Gemini 2.5 Flash.
The model costs $1 per million input and output tokens. It has a context window of 131k tokens. At the moment, the model supports only text input and output. The model has 32B active and total parameters, available in 16bit and 8bit precision, which means the model can be run on a single H100 chip in full precision. Exaone 4.0 is an open weights model available under the EXAONE AI Model License Agreement 1.2. The license limits commercial use.
LG’s AI Research Lab, which creates the Exaone models, serves as the artificial intelligence research hub of the South Korean consumer electronics conglomerate LG Group. It was launched in December 2020 with the mission to lead the next era of AI innovation. By 2023, it aimed to foster 1,000 AI experts within the LG group, running custom education programs and offering a unique personnel compensation system. The lab actively collaborates with prestigious universities such as Seoul National University and the University of Toronto to further AI innovation. LG has expanded its research presence globally, with major facilities in Seoul, Santa Clara (Silicon Valley), and Toronto. One of the lab’s aims is the seamless integration of AI across LG’s product ecosystem.
And it’s likely that other large conglomerates like LG will want to create their own AI models. AI will ultimately be a part of most consumer appliance devices that LG makes including TVs and refrigerators, and sufficiently large companies will want to create their own AI systems and not rely on third party models. And with LG’s models making it to the top leaderboards, these companies can also help push AI progress by making models that not only compete with frontier models, but also perform better on specific on-device use-cases that these companies may require.