The Development of Large Language Models in France, Germany, and South Korea:

Distinctive Features and Leading Achievements

In the global wave of large language model development, France, Germany, and South Korea have each demonstrated unique development paths and achievements.

France has made substantial investments in the AI field. The Artificial Intelligence Action Summit held in Paris in February 2025 highlights its proactive stance in the AI domain. The French AI startup Mistral AI is highly favored by President Emmanuel Macron. With the strong support of enterprises such as Microsoft and NVIDIA, the favorable financing environment has attracted numerous investors. Mistral AI's portfolio of models is diverse, with models like Mistral 7B, Mistral 8x7B, and Mistral Large each having their own merits. Le Chat, which was launched in February 2025 and is similar to ChatGPT, was quickly upgraded and launched on mobile devices on February 6, providing a very convenient user experience. Mistral Large's performance is on par with GPT-4, but its cost is much lower, offering high cost-effectiveness. Codestral-Mamba-7B, as the first code generation model based on the Mamba-2 architecture, stands out in the programming field. Mathstral-7B focuses on mathematical reasoning and helps solve various mathematical problems.

In contrast, Germany lags slightly behind in the development of the AI field. Issues such as market fragmentation, insufficient capital markets, and cumbersome regulations have become obstacles to its development. However, Germany is also actively seeking breakthroughs. The Large European AI Model (LEAM) initiative carried out by the German Association for Artificial Intelligence has received full support from German industry giants such as Bosch and SAP, as well as similar AI associations in Europe. They are working together to create a highly competitive AI ecosystem. As early as April 2022, the German startup Aleph Alpha released the pre-trained model Luminous with 70 billion parameters and trained the chatbot Lumi based on it. There are also plans to release Luminous-World with a parameter scale of 300 billion. The biggest highlight of Luminous is its high emphasis on security and privacy. It firmly does not record user data, allowing users to use it without any concerns.

South Korea's development in the field of large language models also has its own unique characteristics. The country has a sound infrastructure in the field of large language models. Semiconductor giants such as Samsung Electronics and SK Telecom provide strong computing power support, and Internet benchmark enterprises like Naver and Kakao also play important roles. However, there is a noticeable shortcoming in South Korea's large language model field, which is the scarcity of startups and the lack of investment in them. On March 18, 2025, LG AI Research launched EXAONE Deep, South Korea's first open-source reasoning AI model. Its main model, EXAONE Deep-32B, has 32 billion parameters and has shown excellent performance in mathematical reasoning. It scored higher than some Chinese models on the questions of the 2024 US Mathematical Olympiad and also achieved high scores in the mathematics section of South Korea's 2025 College Scholastic Ability Test (CSAT). However, its coding and language abilities still have significant room for improvement. In addition, Kakao Brain released KoGPT based on GPT-3 and updated it to GPT-3.5.

Overall, France's Mistral AI has emerged prominently in the global competition of large language models due to the diversity and excellent performance of its models. Germany's Luminous, characterized by its emphasis on security and privacy protection, promotes the construction of an AI ecosystem through large-scale initiatives. South Korea's EXAONE Deep has significant advantages in mathematical reasoning, and LG has launched lightweight models of different scales to meet diverse needs. These three countries are each writing their own wonderful chapters on the path of large language model development and contributing unique strengths to the global development of large language models.