LG’s Exaone 4.0 Drops: South Korea’s AI Powerhouse Unleashes Next-Gen Reasoning Model

LG just flipped the AI chessboard—Exaone 4.0 isn’t playing checkers.

The Brain Upgrade You Didn’t See Coming

While crypto bros were busy losing leverage on meme coins, South Korea’s tech titan quietly deployed a reasoning model that makes GPT-5 look like a Clippy reboot. No hype, just 100% more synaptic firepower.

Why TradFi Should Sweat

Wall Street’s quant algos? Cute. Exaone 4.0’s architecture reportedly crunches unstructured data like a Bloomberg terminal eating spreadsheets—except it actually understands sarcasm (unlike your fund manager).

The Bottom Line

Another ‘AI revolution’ press release? Maybe. But when a conglomerate that survived four market crashes drops new silicon, even Bitcoin maximalists pause their shitposting. For at least 12 seconds.

LG AI research launched Exaone Deep in March

LG AI Research was first established in 2020 to accelerate the practical use of generative AI. Not long after, the group launched its first model, Exaone 1.0, in 2021.

Then, in March 2025, the company launched South Korea’s first reasoning artificial intelligence (AI) model, Exaone Deep, with its main model, Exaone Deep-32B.

The model includes 32 billion parameters to aid in AI learning and reasoning, and experts claim it performs on a level comparable to Deepseek’s R1. Deepseek’s RI model has 671 billion parameters, about 95% more than the Exaone Deep-32-B.

While a higher parameter count often correlates with improved performance, it also demands more computational resources. As a result, more companies are shifting their focus toward optimizing models to deliver similar results with fewer parameters.

Per several performance tests, the Exaone DEEP model surpasses Deepseek’s R1 and Alibaba’s QwQ-32B models in most. In the 2024 US Mathematical Olympiad, Exaone Deep-32B scored 90, beating Deepseek and Alibaba models at 86.7.

The South Korean model also led in South Korea’s 2025 CSAT math section with an impressive 94.5. Not to mention, it outperformed the QwQ-32B version in doctoral-level science, earning a score of 66.1 against 63.3. Nevertheless, Exaone Deep still lags in coding and language prompts compared to Deepseek’s Alibaba models.

According to LG, the new Exaone 4.0 has also performed better in more performance tests than other AI models from the United States, China, and France. So far, very few companies have developed comparable hybrid models. The established hybrid reasoning systems in the market include Anthropic’s Claude and Alibaba’s Qwen models. That aside, the new Exaone 4.0 will be available in Seoul on July 22.

OpenAI released two reasoning artificial intelligence models

OpenAI also launched new AI reasoning models, the o3 and o4-mini. The company explained that the o3 model is optimized for solving complex, multistep scientific problems, though it trades speed for depth in processing. It also includes Codex CLI, an AI agent designed to aid people with coding. The open-source feature can run directly on a user’s computer, working through the device’s terminal software.

Meanwhile, the o4-mini model performs comparably to o3, though it’s more compact and nimble. Both models accept visual representation into the reasoning process, the first for any reasoning system OpenAI unveiled. According to the company, the systems can zoom in on or process blurry images to deliver accurate responses. So far, both models are accessible to the firm’s subscribers.

The firm’s Chief Executive Officer, Sam Altman, is also preparing to release an open version of an AI reasoning system in the months to come, seeing Deepseek’s success with the open-source model, R1. Altman also stated they will launch their GPT-5 model in a few months.

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