South Korea Says It Cannot Afford to Slow Down AI Development

South Korea's Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Science and ICT, Bae Kyung-hoon, said the country must keep pushing AI forward and cannot stop or slow down. South Korea is home to Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, two memory chip giants, making it a major beneficiary of the global AI data center boom.

Bae noted a fundamental difference between leading countries choosing to slow down and countries still catching up and trying to create new markets. From South Korea's perspective, it cannot afford to slow AI development. This stance differs from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's call to slow frontier AI development, and is closer to the views of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.

Bae said South Korea should speed up AI research and application while strengthening defenses against deepfakes, cyberattacks, and privacy risks. He will soon announce the next phase of the country's independent AI foundation model plan. South Korea will not turn back the clock on AI development and will move faster but also more safely.