Korea needs AI-based innovation to find breakthrough in falling birthrate, aging population

ICT Minister Lee Jong-ho, front row third from left, poses with company CEOs taking part in the National AI Strategy Meeting at FKI Tower in Yeouido, Seoul, Friday. Participants in the first row include KT CEO Kim Young-shub, second from left, Presidential Committee on the Digital Platform Government President Koh Jean, third from right, and Kakao CEO nominee Chung Shin-a, second from right. The second row includes Naver CEO Choi Soo-yeon, second from right, AmorePacific CEO Kim Seung-hwan, third from right, and Doosan Robotics CEO Ryu Jung-hoon, fourth from right. Yonhap

Korea, which has been struggling with a declining birthrate and aging population, needs to find a breakthrough using innovations based on AI technology, and to do so, the private sector and the government should cooperate, according to the ICT minister, Friday.

"Despite ongoing domestic and international concerns about economic and social disasters such as high interest rates, low growth, low birthrate and aging population, we have once again confirmed that a breakthrough can be made through AI-based innovation," Science and ICT Minister Lee Jong-ho said during the fifth National AI Strategy Meeting in Seoul.

The meeting was held with the aim of enhancing Korea's AI competitiveness at a time when it was confirmed at the CES tech trade show held in the U.S. last week that AI technology is spreading in daily life and devices beyond the boundaries of the industries.

Present at the meeting were CEOs from not only AI companies such as Naver, Kakao and LG AI Research, but also representatives of companies in various fields such as beauty companies like AmorePacific, home appliance companies like Samsung Electronics, robotics company Doosan Robotics and telecommunications company KT as well as chiefs of startups that won innovation awards at CES.

"The era of AI being with us everywhere in our daily lives has opened, and major countries are already making all their efforts in creating related infrastructure and investment, with companies and countries becoming one," the minister said.

"In order not to lag behind this, government and industry must become one team for AI-based growth beyond the boundaries of industry, and a grand consensus of national capabilities must be formed. I hope today's meeting will be the starting point for that."

During the meeting, Naver CEO Choi Soo-yeon asked the government to provide more support for companies to raise their competitiveness.

“It's been a long time since the world's platforms, such as search, messenger and commerce, have been dependent on the U.S. and China. It's not far off to be dependent on some U.S. tech companies for AI, data centers, GPUs and other hardware," Choi said during the meeting. "Securing national competitiveness is important, and I ask for the government's substantial support for this."

Kakao, which provides the country’s most popular mobile messenger app KakaoTalk, also unveiled Honeybee, its multimodal large language model (MLLM), for the first time. The company said its MLLM answers in text when an image and command are input, an expanded form from the existing LLM that answers only in text.

For example, if users prompt Honeybee with a picture of two basketball players and ask by text how many championships the player on the left has won, Honeybee generates an answer.

"Kakao has developed a mobile era communication delivery platform, and it plans to release an MLLM, which can be used soon," said Chung Shin-a, CEO nominee of Kakao. "Unlike the mobile era, collaboration and ecosystem emergence are important in the AI era, so the government needs to prepare policies such as infrastructure, and we need to think about global expansion of the AI ecosystem with everyone gathered here."

KT CEO Kim Young-shub said, "AI is KT's growth strategy. We will concentrate efforts and investments in developing customer services through the construction of core infrastructure such as data centers, GPUs, MPUs and AI clouds."

Government agencies are also actively working to incorporate AI into everyday life.

“We will support various companies together with the Ministry of Science and ICT,” said Koh Jean, chairman of the Presidential Committee on the Digital Platform Government. "We especially want to support situations that are difficult in the early stages of the industry by creating many public projects."