Upstage's Solar Pro 4 becomes available to civil servants on gov't network
A promotional image of Solar Pro 4 / Courtesy of Upstage
Korean artificial intelligence (AI) startup Upstage said Tuesday that its large language model Solar Pro 4 is now fully available on the government’s shared AI platform. Civil servants can now use a domestically developed AI model for daily work inside the government’s closed administrative network.
The Ministry of the Interior and Safety and the Ministry of Science and ICT run the platform. Through it, they provide AI models, data and development tools to central government agencies and local governments. Solar Pro 4 is offered through FabriX, an AI agent platform from Samsung SDS, the IT services affiliate of Samsung Group.
The model runs on network infrastructure that passed a security review by the National Intelligence Service, Korea’s spy agency. Internal government data remains within the network. The platform centrally manages the graphics processing units (GPUs), the high-performance chips needed to run AI models. This means agencies can use the model through a chat interface or an application programming interface without buying or leasing their own GPU servers.
The model draws on laws, press releases and administrative documents, and it can cite the sources behind its answers. Upstage said this makes it reliable enough for public-sector work.
Officials can use it to check whether proposed local ordinances conflict with higher laws and to draft replies to citizen complaints. They can also turn meeting notes into draft reports and summarize long policy documents.
Until now, public agencies have had trouble using advanced AI. They cannot send internal data to outside AI services, and building their own GPU infrastructure is difficult.
Upstage released Solar Pro 4 in August. According to the company, it became the first Korean model officially listed on OpenRouter, a global platform that gives developers access to AI models.
“AI for public work must be trustworthy, keeping data secure and backing its answers with evidence,” Upstage CEO Sung Kim said.
This article was published with the assistance of generative AI and edited by The Korea Times.