&w=3840&q=100)
OpenAI to set up office in Seoul as demand for ChatGPT grows in South Korea
South Korea has the largest number of paying ChatGPT subscribers after the United States, according to OpenAI. read more
OpenAI will set up its first office in Seoul and has established an entity in South Korea as demand in the country jumps for its ChatGPT service, the company said on Monday.
South Korea has the largest number of paying ChatGPT subscribers after the United States, according to OpenAI.
OpenAI has also begun hiring staff to support partnerships with the country and expects to announce further details on this in coming months, the company said.
STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD
'Korea's full-stack AI ecosystem makes it one of the most promising markets in the world for meaningful AI impact, from silicon to software, and students to seniors,' Chief Strategy Officer Jason Kwon said in a statement.
More from Tech
South Korea protests China's maritime restrictions in shared waters
Earlier this year, OpenAI announced it would develop artificial intelligence products for South Korea with chat app operator Kakao.
Kwon, who is visiting Seoul, is set to hold a meeting with officials from the main opposition Democratic Party and the ruling People Power Party, local media reported.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Indian Express
3 hours ago
- Indian Express
OpenAI plans to turn ChatGPT into an all-in-one AI ‘super assistant': Report
OpenAI is gearing up to reinvent ChatGPT, the popular AI chatbot, into an 'AI super assistant' that knows the user and acts as their main gateway to the internet. The Microsoft-backed AI startup's plans regarding the future of ChatGPT was disclosed in an internal strategy document that was shared as part of the legal discovery process in the Google search antitrust case filed by the US Department of Justice. The document titled 'ChatGPT: H1 2025 Strategy' is from 2024 and is heavily redacted. It shows that OpenAI is planning to develop an 'AI super assistant that deeply understands you and is your interface to the internet,' according to a report by The Verge. 'Today, ChatGPT is in our lives through existing form factors — our website, phone, and desktop apps. But our vision for ChatGPT is to help you with all of your life, no matter where you are. At home, it should help answer questions, play music, and suggest recipes. On the go, it should help you get to places, find the best restaurants, or catch up with friends. At work, it should help you take meeting notes, or prepare for the big presentation. And on solo walks, it should help you reflect and wind down,' the document reads. The unredacted parts of the document reportedly suggest that OpenAI intends to transform ChatGPT from an AI tool into a companion. It also indicates that the company believes hardware will play a critical role in the broader vision for ChatGPT. OpenAI has been quite serious about developing an AI-powered gadget for several years now, despite the struggles and failures of others in the space. Last week, the company announced it was acquiring former Apple executive Jony Ive's AI devices startup, io, for $6.4 billion in an all-equity deal. 'In the first half of next year, we'll start evolving ChatGPT into a super-assistant: one that knows you, understands what you care about, and helps with any task that a smart, trustworthy, emotionally intelligent person with a computer could do,' the document reads. 'The timing is right. Models like 02 and 03 are finally smart enough to reliably perform agentic tasks, tools like computer use can boost ChatGPT's ability to take action, and interaction paradigms like multimodality and generative UI allow both ChatGPT and users to express themselves in the best way for the task,' it adds. According to OpenAI, an AI super assistant is 'an intelligent entity with T-shaped skills' for both widely applicable and niche tasks such as coding. 'The broad part is all about making life easier: answering a question, finding a home, contacting a lawyer, joining a gym, planning vacations, buying gifts, managing calendars, keeping track of todos, sending emails,' the document states. OpenAI has also acknowledged that there are 'powerful incumbents who will leverage their distribution to advantage their own products.' It states that the company will support regulation that requires other platforms to allow users to select ChatGPT as their default assistant. 'We have what we need to win: one of the fastest-growing products of all time, a category-defining brand, a research lead (reasoning, multimodal), a compute lead, a world-class research team, and an increasing number of effective people with agency who are motivated to ship,' as per the document. 'We don't rely on ads, giving us flexibility on what to build. Our culture values speed, bold moves, and self-disruption. Maintaining these advantages is hard work but, if we do, they will last for a while,' it further states.
Time of India
4 hours ago
- Time of India
Silicon Valley VCs navigate uncertain AI future
By Alex Pigman For Silicon Valley venture capitalists , the world has split into two camps: those with deep enough pockets to invest in artificial intelligence behemoths, and everyone else waiting to see where the AI revolution leads. The generative AI frenzy unleashed by ChatGPT in 2022 has propelled a handful of venture-backed companies to eye-watering valuations. Leading the pack is OpenAI, which raised $40 billion in its latest funding round at a $300 billion valuation -- unprecedented largesse in Silicon Valley's history. Other AI giants are following suit. Anthropic now commands a $61.5 billion valuation, while Elon Musk's xAI is reportedly in talks to raise $20 billion at a $120 billion price tag. The stakes have grown so high that even major venture capital firms -- the same ones that helped birth the internet revolution -- can no longer compete. Mostly, only the deepest pockets remain in the game: big tech companies, Japan's SoftBank, and Middle Eastern investment funds betting big on a post-fossil fuel future. "There's a really clear split between the haves and the have-nots," says Emily Zheng, senior analyst at PitchBook, told AFP at the Web Summit in Vancouver. "Even though the top-line figures are very high, it's not necessarily representative of venture overall, because there's just a few elite startups and a lot of them happen to be AI." Given Silicon Valley's confidence that AI represents an era-defining shift, venture capitalists face a crucial challenge: finding viable opportunities in an excruciatingly expensive market that is rife with disruption. Simon Wu of Cathay Innovation sees clear customer demand for AI improvements, even if most spending flows to the biggest players. "AI across the board, if you're selling a product that makes you more efficient, that's flying off the shelves," Wu explained. "People will find money to spend on OpenAI" and the big players. The real challenge, according to Andy McLoughlin, managing partner at San Francisco-based Uncork Capital, is determining "where the opportunities are against the mega platforms." "If you're OpenAI or Anthropic, the amount that you can do is huge. So where are the places that those companies cannot play?" Finding that answer isn't easy. In an industry where large language models behind ChatGPT, Claude and Google's Gemini seem to have limitless potential, everything moves at breakneck speed. AI giants including Google, Microsoft , and Amazon are releasing tools and products at a furious pace. ChatGPT and its rivals now handle search, translation, and coding all within one chatbot -- raising doubts among investors about what new ideas could possibly survive the competition. Generative AI has also democratized software development, allowing non-professionals to code new applications from simple prompts. This completely disrupts traditional startup organization models. "Every day I think, what am I going to wake up to today in terms of something that has changed or (was) announced geopolitically or within our world as tech investors," reflected Christine Tsai, founding partner and CEO at 500 Global. The 'moat' problem In Silicon Valley parlance, companies are struggling to find a "moat" -- that unique feature or breakthrough like Microsoft Windows in the 1990s or Google Search in the 2000s that's so successful it takes competitors years to catch up, if ever. When it comes to business software, AI is "shaking up the topology of what makes sense and what's investable," noted Brett Gibson, managing partner at Initialized Capital. The risks seem particularly acute given that generative AI's economics remain unproven. Even the biggest players see a very uncertain path to profitability given the massive sums involved. The huge valuations for OpenAI and others are causing "a lot of squinting of the eyes, with people wondering 'is this really going to replace labor costs'" at the levels needed to justify the investments, Wu observed. Despite AI's importance, "I think everyone's starting to see how this might fall short of the magical" even if its early days, he added. Still, only the rare contrarians believe generative AI isn't here to stay. In five years, "we won't be talking about AI the same way we're talking about it now, the same way we don't talk about mobile or cloud," predicted McLoughlin. "It'll become a fabric of how everything gets built." But who will be building remains an open question.
Mint
6 hours ago
- Mint
AI tracker: When AI gets smarter and more 'mischievous'
Anthropic's Claude 4 shows troubling behavior, attempting harmful actions like blackmail and self-propagation. While Google integrates ads into its AI search, the Auschwitz museum combats AI-generated misinformation about Holocaust victims. These developments highlight the need for vigilance in AI advancements and their societal implications. Anthropic launched its latest Claude generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) models recently and also published a report on the security tests carried out on Claude 4, which found instances of the model attempting to write self-propagating worms, fabricating legal documentation, and leaving hidden notes to future instances of itself—all in an effort to undermine its developers' intentions. Claude Opus 4 'sometimes takes extremely harmful actions like attempting to blackmail people it believes are trying to shut it down,' the company revealed in a rare show of honesty, adding that it has implemented 'safeguards' and 'additional monitoring of harmful behaviour' in the version that it released. Google is dabbling with ads in its new AI Mode for online search, a strategic move to fend off competition from ChatGPT while adapting its advertising business for an AI age, AFP reported. The integration of advertising has been a key question accompanying the rise of generative AI chatbots, which have largely avoided interrupting the user experience with marketing messages. A new AI Mode enables conversational interaction with Google during search queries, providing answers in diverse formats, such as video, audio or graphs. The internet giant said it is testing integrating ads into AI Mode responses, building on insights gained from its AI-generated summaries/overviews. The Auschwitz museum has warned against Facebook posts with AI-generated fictional images of victims of the Holocaust. The museum at the site of the former Auschwitz-Birkenau camp has long used its own social media accounts to publish authentic victim photos, names and information to raise awareness. Now the museum has discovered that a few Facebook pages were producing similar victim bios but with fictional information or photos. Such posts were harmful because 'producing artificial information, last names, is falsifying history', said a spokesperson. Disinformation could even lead to Holocaust denial, they added.
