You mentioned "pareto-competitive", and EXAONE certainly was that. The statement that the "above countries have never had a model that is even close to being so" is simply too broad.

You're talking about EXAONE 4.5 33B? Gemma 4 31B was released 1 week earlier and blows it out of the water. Which point in time/model size are you possibly talking about? The original K-EXAONE in January?

More than anything the availability speaks for itself. If it was indeed pareto competitive, all dozens of model providers would be doing their best to offer it for serverless inference. They don't. There's maybe one that does. Do you think a lot of companies wouldn't prefer a Korean model over a Chinese one? In this case, the market speaks. Go talk to people who run business based on putting billions or trillions of tokens through open weights models. And how much time they put into optimization of model selection to save money and latency. And ask why none of them are using EXAONE models. It's not because we're not aware of their existence. There's also reason to believe they've been benchmaxxing more than Chinese models, btw. Have you done the vibecheck?

I wish they were strong, I hope that in the future, they are. More diversity is better. So far they have not yet been a serious option at any point.