Korea cannot do everything well in artificial intelligence (AI). Just as Korea succeeded by making

"Korea cannot do everything well in artificial intelligence (AI). Just as Korea succeeded by making good memory semiconductors in the semiconductor industry, it can do well in certain areas that are important in the AI value chain."

Kim Gun-hee, a professor of computer engineering at Seoul National University, who is considered one of Korea's leading scholars in the AI field, said in a recent interview with Maeil Economy, "Korean companies need to make choices and focus on AI in order to be competitive."

Professor Kim is an expert in natural language processing and computer vision. This year, two papers were adopted in 'NeurIPS', one of the world's leading AI conferences, and they are actively engaged in research activities. In 2018, he is also a representative of a company, starting a multimodal technology-based start-up called RippleAI that recognizes text and images together.

Global big tech companies such as Google and OpenAI are investing tens of trillions of won in astronomical investments to advance AI services. Through this, it is moving beyond the level of an AI chatbot to the AI agent domain. In this regard, Professor Kim said, "AI agents are an area that is difficult to challenge in Korea, where the base of the software industry is not wide. However, the impossibility of keeping up with open AI does not mean that AI unicorns cannot come out of Korea."

Professor Kim suggested 'Bertical AI' as an alternative. Vertical AI refers to AI specialized in a specific field. Even if it does not build a super large model like GPT, it is characterized by securing and upgrading in-depth data in each industry such as medical, legal, logistics, and finance. As the AI market grows, customer demand also diversifies, so it can be a big enough company even if it can satisfy only a specific demand, he said. "We can create specialized vertical AI without AI source models to explore opportunities."

Professor Kim chose manufacturing as a field where Korea can create synergy effects through combination with AI.

"Korea is a manufacturing powerhouse in the global world, such as semiconductors and batteries," he said. "We need to go in the direction of using AI to be more successful in areas where Korea is doing well." For example, if Samsung Electronics improves semiconductor yield by applying AI technology to semiconductor processes, even a slight increase in yield can create tens of billions of won and hundreds of billions of won in value. "Domestic manufacturers, such as Samsung, are trying very hard to apply AI to each process, and it seems that results continue to come out," he said. "In that respect, we are using AI well."

[Reporter Jeong Hojun]