LG Debuts Exaone 4.0: South Korea’s Hybrid AI Scores Record 94.5

- LG’s Exaone 4.0 impresses in global benchmarks, outscoring rivals. - The hybrid AI model signals South Korea’s growing tech leadership. According to a July 15, 2025, press release, South Korea's LG AI Research unveiled Exaone 4.0, the nation’s first hybrid-reasoning artificial intelligence (AI) model. This groundbreaking system integrates natural language processing with advanced hypothesis generation, marking a significant leap in the global AI landscape. In addition, LG released the model with an open-weight license on the Hugging Face platform, a decision that empowers researchers and educators worldwide to modify and redistribute the model, thereby amplifying its impact and accessibility. Exaone 4.0 demonstrated unmatched performance in rigorous evaluations for mathematics, science, and coding, outperforming several leading open-weight competitors, including Alibaba’s Qwen 3, Microsoft’s Phi-4-reasoning-plus, and Mistral AI’s Magistral-small-2506. The 32 billion-parameter model also achieved unprecedented results by passing written exams for six national professional licenses, including qualifications for medical doctors. Industry insiders hail these accomplishments as pivotal benchmarks that demonstrate the model's efficiency and cutting-edge reasoning capabilities. This debut comes just four months after LG introduced Exaone Deep, its initial reasoning AI system. The rapid development emphasizes LG’s commitment to creating efficient solutions that achieve peak outcomes with fewer parameters. As a result, analysts see this evolution as evidence of South Korea’s growing prominence in the AI sphere and its readiness to compete on the global stage. In the broader competitive landscape, LG’s unveiling rivals major advancements from other tech leaders. For instance, OpenAI announced on April 16, 2025, the launch of two new reasoning models, o3 and o4-mini. The o3 model aims to redefine multi-step problem-solving, while o4-mini leverages compact optimization for comparable performance. These developments reflect the intensifying innovation within reasoning AI. To spotlight its achievements, LG will host the “LG AI Talk Concert 2025” in Seoul on July 22. At the event, Exaone 4.0 and other AI developments will take center stage.