There was criticism that the direction of the government-led domestic artificial intelligence (AI) industry promotion policy is incorrect and that the AI industry may even fall right into a recession resulting from lack of research.
Recently, in keeping with domestic AI industry officials, the federal government claims to be the ‘three major AI powers’, but an assessment has emerged that it’s merely a show-off administration that doesn’t help the actual development of the industry.
Startup officials who participated in CES criticized local governments for inflating their performance based on the variety of startups they participated in and supported at overseas fairs. He said, “There are too many Korean firms in Eureka Park, a startup hall, so it’s difficult to develop sales channels or find overseas business opportunities on site,” adding, “A lot of them are only wasting money.”
Actually, it was said that almost all of the joint pavilions prepared by each local government were held at CES 2025 held this yr, and only Koreans visited the booth.
As well as, it was identified that the federal government’s conflation of AI and AI semiconductor fields isn’t effective. Most government support is concentrated on semiconductors, which has nothing to do with the actual AI industry.
AI semiconductor officials also admit that the technology gap is simply too large, saying, “Nvidia’s GPU takes over 90% of the market share, and the remaining market is shared by semiconductor firms around the globe.” Specifically, it was identified that domestic semiconductor technology focuses on memory comparable to HBM and has no direct relationship with AI.
Criticism of domestic firms’ passive research and development continued. An AI startup official identified that the gap with the U.S. and China is widening because domestic AI firms have relied only on open source models and neglected core research and development.
Most domestic AI models are released by moreover learning some data and improving performance on open source models released by big tech firms comparable to ‘Lama’ or ‘Gemma’.
Specifically, it has been said that leading domestic firms are neglecting the event of foundation models resulting from cost issues, and that other firms are also passive in investing in research into source technologies which might be alternatives to or complements to transformer architecture.
Amongst these, it is claimed that the claim for ‘sovereign AI’ centered on Korean language data isn’t only without justification, but has absolutely nothing to do with international competitiveness. Specifically, one official raised his voice of criticism, saying, “It looks as if the corporate only wants government support as an alternative of investing in technology development with its own capital.”
Actually, the launch of models by major domestic firms is sort of a bean on the wall. Fortunately, LG AI Research Institute has been repeatedly upgrading its models, and Exaone ranked first in the sting category of the cuddling face leaderboard and is thought to be receiving good reviews from overseas users.
An official with greater than 20 years of experience within the IT industry said, “The truth of the domestic AI industry is that it’s difficult to decide on and focus in a situation where there may be a shortage of computing infrastructure, talent, and capital.” He added, “It is crucial to start out with whether to take a position in AI service development or basic research.” “It needs to be decided,” he said.
He also added that it’s meaningless to compete within the domestic leaderboard rankings within the absence of a foundation model.
“Simply because the leaderboard rating is high doesn’t mean that it’s an AI service that actual users can be satisfied with,” he said. “At present, evidently the leaderboard is solely used for promotional and marketing purposes.” It is claimed that there are frequent cases where some firms suddenly upload a model to the leaderboard, capture only the chart image, and use it for promotional purposes.
He emphasized that in comparison with global AI firms contributing to the expansion of the commercial ecosystem by releasing open source models on the Hugging Face leaderboard, the behavior of domestic firms runs counter to the aim of the leaderboard.
Reporter Park Soo-bin sbin08@aitimes.com
