[Column] What Korean AI Industry Really Needs

"Artificial Intelligence (AI) is an unstoppable trend." "The common sense that humanity has known for thousands of years will be completely changed."

These were remarks made at SK Group's 'Icheon Forum,' which focused on AI. J?rgen Schmidhuber, a professor at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia, known as the 'Father of AI,' predicted in his forum lecture that "AI is not just a single industrial sector but can be central to the formation of a civilization and society."

There seems to be little disagreement that AI is rapidly transforming our lives and is an industry with significant economic potential. SK Group unveiled a blueprint to invest 82 trillion won over the next five years in AI. The group's core strategy is to expand mass production of AI semiconductors, represented by High Bandwidth Memory (HBM), and to build physical infrastructure by expanding data centers. Samsung Electronics is also significantly increasing its investment to capture the AI semiconductor market, raising its investment in U.S. semiconductor production facilities to $44 billion (approximately 58.4452 trillion won).

Looking at the AI moves of domestic conglomerates, some things appear to be left behind. Talent is one of them. Rapidly changing and explosively growing industries always worry about talent shortages. Although massive investments in facilities and infrastructure have been promised, strategies to attract AI talent are not clearly visible. AI, after all, can only be developed and advanced by people. Moreover, the evolution of AI is changing the rules of the game. In this era, a product that is cheap and high-quality today can become an 'artifact of the old era' tomorrow as AI changes the game. The power to catch up with or surpass this speed ultimately comes from people. Global big tech companies are absorbing AI talent worldwide by offering compensation worth tens to hundreds of billions of won.

What should the Korean industry do? At the very least, those born and raised in Korea who 'prefer' to work in Korea should not be lost. It is not uncommon to meet people who majored in engineering, joined domestic conglomerates, but want to move to the U.S., constantly updating their resumes on various headhunter sites and checking alerts. Unlike Korea, where only those in their 40s or 50s can dream of earning a billion-won salary, overseas AI developers in their 30s are already eyeing salaries worth tens of billions of won. According to Stanford University's Human-Centered AI Institute (HAI), last year Korea ranked third in AI talent outflow, following India and Israel.

Ultimately, AI talent must be given exceptional incentives. There must be a signal that great wealth follows great performance. Domestic conglomerates like Samsung and SK should not only pursue talent acquisition quietly but openly promote and boast about their salary and performance bonus tables. The number of promising Korean engineering students suddenly taking leaves of absence to pursue medical school or study abroad should decrease somewhat.

Jack Clark, a former executive of OpenAI who participated in the Icheon Forum the day before, said, "The first thing companies like SK should do is change incentives and team structures," adding, "Team size and performance are not proportional, and we have entered an era where a single individual can create a unicorn-level company. Companies need to think about how they provide incentives to employees and what they offer to develop and grow them within the company."

Jung Dong-hoon, Industrial IT Department Photo by Jung Dong-hoon

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.