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Korea Herald
12 hours ago
- Business
- Korea Herald
[Robert J. Fouser] South Korea's AI goals
New presidents in South Korea stir a wave of new policies and big national goals. As the country has developed, new presidents have shifted away from big national goals in favor of a longer list of policy initiatives. President Lee Jae Myung's all-out push to improve AI competitiveness represents a shift back to big goals. The president aims to make South Korea one of the top three most competitive nations in AI by the end of his term in 2030. Like many previous big goals, this is ambitious but achievable with focus and drive. National AI competitiveness is difficult to rank because the data informing the rankings changes so fast. Several rankings, however, show why the president's goal is achievable. The 'Global AI Index' by Tortoise Media and the 'Global Vibrancy Tool' by Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI use data from 2023 and 2024 but offer interesting insight. According to both surveys, the US is far in the lead, with China a respectable second. In the 'Global AI Index,' South Korea is sixth, with Singapore, the UK and France sitting between it and the top two. South Korea comes seventh in the 'Global Vibrancy Tool,' with the UK, India, the United Arab Emirates and France sitting above it. In both rankings, South Korea ranks higher than traditional industrial and engineering powerhouses like Germany and Japan. Among countries with a population over 50 million, South Korea ranks fifth after the US, China, the UK and France. Among these populous countries, it is the only country that uses a language with limited geographic spread. South Korea is clearly an AI powerhouse. Indeed, it has continued to improve its standing in the two rankings. In the first 'Global AI Index,' which came out in 2022, the country ranked eighth. In the first 'Global Vibrancy Tool,' which came out (way back) in 2017, it ranked 14th. The trajectory has been steadily upward. President Lee's goal of moving it up several notches to third place is clearly attainable. Most nations ranking around or below South Korea are also focusing on AI competitiveness, which means that the country has to work to keep its current position while aiming higher. What can it do? Among the seven categories comprising the 'Global AI Index,' South Korea ranks lowest, at 35th, for 'operating environment,' which focuses on the regulatory environment and public opinion. Its next lowest ranking is 13th in the 'talent' and 'research' categories, which cover the availability of AI-related talent. In the eight categories of the 'Global Vibrancy Tool,' South Korea ranks lowest in education, at 18th out of 36 nations. Its other low-ranking categories are 'responsible AI,' 'economy' and 'diversity.' Results from the two rankings are similar in highlighting the need to foster and attract AI talent, from research to implementation. The market for AI talent is global and becoming increasingly competitive. To compete, South Korean companies need to retain top domestic talent while attracting talent from abroad. This will cost money and require efforts to increase openness in corporate culture. At the same time, South Korea needs to direct more of its formidable R&D budget to AI and related fields. At present, the country ranks second in the world, between Israel and the US, in the percentage of gross domestic product spent on R&D. The two rankings diverge when it comes to the regulatory environment, but both were developed before the passage of the Basic Act on the Development of Artificial Intelligence and Creation of a Trust Base (Basic AI Act) in December 2024. The legislation, which is set to take effect in January 2026, was designed to provide a unified legal framework for the development, regulation, and ethical oversight of artificial intelligence technologies. South Korea is the second country after the EU to adopt a comprehensive AI law. Unlike the EU's AI Act, it does not impose detailed technical regulations directly, but empowers ministries, particularly the Ministry of Science and ICT, to work out the details as conditions change. If done well, this should help develop and maintain public trust without hurting innovation and competitiveness. Finally, South Korea's demographic crisis could work in its favor as the country adopts AI to fill gaps in a shrinking workforce. Increasingly, businesses are turning to AI to make up for a lack of workers rather than cost-cutting. Such needs will only continue to grow, which will help propel the country into the lead in developing practical applications of AI for others to adopt. Robert J. Fouser, a former associate professor of Korean language education at Seoul National University, writes on Korea from Providence, Rhode Island. He can be reached at robertjfouser@ The views expressed here are the writer's own. -- Ed.
Forbes
01-05-2025
- Business
- Forbes
The 2025 Stanford AI Index: 5 Takeaways That Are Important For Your Business
Last month the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI - an interdisciplinary institute established in 2019 to advance AI research, education, policy, and practice - published its 2025 AI Index Report, which aims to "develop a more thorough and nuanced understanding of the complex field of AI." The report had a number of important takeaways that impact all of us running businesses. Here are the five biggest takeaways. The report says: In 2022, the smallest model registering a score higher than 60% on the Massive Multitask Language Understanding (MMLU) benchmark was PaLM, with 540 billion parameters. By 2024, Microsoft's Phi-3-mini, with just 3.8 billion parameters, achieved the same threshold. This represents a 142-fold reduction in over two years. Depending on the task, LLM inference prices have fallen anywhere from 9 to 900 times per year since 2022. As I wrote previously here, it's becoming more affordable for businesses of all sizes to build their own AI solutions using company data from many different sources. The biggest obstacle remains the price of a developer or IT person sufficiently versed in these tools to do the work. The report says: The number of Al-related incidents rose to 233 in 2024 reached a record high and registered a 56.4% increase over 2023. Among the incidents reported were deepfake intimate images and chatbots allegedly implicated in a teenager's suicide. While this isn't comprehensive, it does show a staggering increase in issues. AI is being used for bad stuff. As business owners we have to let others worry about those terrifying Terminator-Type risks that could destroy human civilization and instead focus on getting training and tools to combat the growing use of AI to fool our employees into downloading malware, opening up our systems for data breaches or inadvertently transferring money out of our accounts. The report says: Al agents show early promise. In short time-horizon settings (two hours), top Al systems score four times higher than human experts, but when given more time to do a task, humans perform better than Al-outscoring it 2-to-1 at 32 hours. Still, Al agents already match human expertise in select tasks, such as writing specific types of code, while delivering results faster. AI agents are rolling out this year but few are worth using in your business due to their immaturity. That's for now. In the meantime we should still be testing them and getting familiar with their capabilities. Within the next few years agents will be commonplace, performing a great deal of work that our employees are currently doing. Some business owners will (rightly) see this as an opportunity to reduce staff. But smarter leaders understand that their job is to prepare their best people to leverage these tools to be even more productive. The U.S. widened its commanding lead in global Al investment. U.S. private Al investment hit $109 billion in 2024, nearly 12 times higher than China's $9.3 billion and 24 times the UK's $4.5 billion. Businesses are turning to Al. In 2024, the proportion of survey respondents reporting Al use by their organizations jumped to 78% from 55% in 2023. Similarly, the number of respondents who reported using generative Al in at least one business function more than doubled-from 33% in 2023 to 71% last year. AI is real. Right now it's a big corporation game with larger brands sinking hundreds of millions of dollars in agentic and generative AI systems that do everything from writing software code to autonomously handling customer service requests. Ultimately these things will pass down to small and mid-sized companies who opt to wait for their core software vendors to introduce AI features into their business processes. U.S. states are leading the way on Al legislation amid slow progress at the federal level. In 2016, only one state-level Al-related law was passed, increasing to 49 by 2023. In the past year alone, that number more than doubled to 131. While proposed Al bills at the federal level have also increased, the number passed remains low. I'm not expecting significant regulations coming at the federal level in the short term. Most will be at the state level and focused on two things: misusing AI in the hiring process (it can be biased) or duping customers with questionable AI bots. Of course, many of these regulations will be decided on by regulators who may be challenged turning on their own TV sets, let alone understanding the implications of AI. But regardless, it will be important to monitor these rules in your state to make sure you're complaint. The above five trends are important for business owners and managers to keep in mind as they're considering AI and other technology investments. And yet as interesting as they are now, won't it be fascinating to see what their 2030 report has to say?
