K-Culture GlossaryㅌThe companies in the headlines
Together AI
An AI cloud that runs open models on your behalf — essentially a server room for companies that want to use open-source models.
In plain words
Together AI is a cloud service that runs publicly available AI models for you. Founded in 2022, it lets developers call up models like Llama or Qwen without having to set up their own servers.
None of the models sold here were actually trained by Together. Its business is running other companies' open models quickly — Meta's Llama, Alibaba's Qwen, DeepSeek, Mistral, and so on. Think of it less as a restaurant and more as a rented kitchen.
That means you have to be careful with wording. It's not "Together AI's Llama" but "Meta's Llama, running on Together AI." Since multiple companies run the same model independently, which model it is and who's running it are two completely separate questions.
These days Together is expanding beyond server rental into large-scale infrastructure it calls "AI factories." In August 2026, it announced a deal to supply 10,000 of the latest GPUs to one of India's largest AI factories, followed by a partnership to build a GPU cluster inside IBM Cloud. Since the same model can run more than ten times faster or slower depending on who's operating it, the skill of "running it well" is itself the company's product.
How it shows up in the news
"You can use DeepSeek on Together AI" — this doesn't mean Together made DeepSeek; it means Together runs the model DeepSeek released publicly.