Korean Startup Attracted by 'Muhanhan Jayu' (Infinite Freedom)

Audio AI Expert Choi Geun-woo Moves from Global Big Tech to GaudioLab
Rapidly Advancing AI Technology... Opportunities Open for Startups Too

Dr. Cho Geun-woo, Director of AI Research at Gaudio Lab

Dr. Woo Choi (37) recently decided to leave a global big tech company and join a Korean startup for a simple reason: the unlimited freedom that startups offer to researchers. Rather than repeating the same tasks in a structurally well-organized organization, he wanted to actively and proactively establish and execute research directions. About three months after joining GaudioLab, an AI audio technology startup founded in 2015, as the Director of AI Research, Dr. Choi shared his experience working at a Korean startup.

Dr. Choi said, "I did not want to repeat the work I did at TikTok again at Instagram." He added, "Now, I lead GaudioLab's AI research organization, establishing AI research directions based on an understanding of academia and industry, and working with team members to execute them." Dr. Choi is a world-renowned researcher in the field of Music Information Retrieval (MIR), having worked at Spotify, a streaming service, and ByteDance, the operator of the global platform TikTok. He completed his Ph.D. at Queen Mary University of London, the largest research institution in the MIR field, and has been recognized as an expert in audio AI technology through 15 years of experience across media domains such as music streaming services and video platforms. In the industry, he has led the development of various recommendation services using music data and sound quality improvement services through research on music source separation technology.

When Dr. Choi chose the audio technology startup GaudioLab last March, he considered the company’s differentiated asset to be its ‘people.’ He said, "GaudioLab has eight acoustic engineering Ph.D. holders, which is rare worldwide, and it is hard to find a company with so many audio experts globally." He added, "This is the agility and strength of the organization."

Dr. Choi believes that as AI technology advances rapidly, opportunities are always open in startups. He explained, "Among the technologies developed by GaudioLab is GTS, which synchronizes music and lyrics. We evaluated the AI solution with much larger and more complex data than what academia uses, and achieved the world’s best performance that passed this standard." He added, "This technology has now been successfully commercialized and is provided to numerous streaming services."

So, what efforts are needed for startups to secure AI development talent? Dr. Choi emphasizes the ‘growth’ of the developers themselves. He believes that developers should not only produce results aligned with the company’s growth direction but also be able to learn through the process. He stressed, "A corporate culture where the company and individuals can grow together is very important."

Recently, Dr. Choi has been focusing on advancing music source separation technology that separates various instruments and voices at GaudioLab. Audio technology applied to metaverse environments is also a recent key research area. Dr. Choi said, "In metaverse environments, technology to generate audio in real-time and play it realistically will be necessary, and AI is already playing an important role in developing such technology."