[The Era of Supermassive AI] "AI Surpassing Humans Is Already a Reality"... Forum on the 'Opening of the Supermassive AI Ecosystem' Held

On the 27th, at Gravity Seoul Pangyo in Seongnam-si, Gyeonggi Province, a commemorative photo was taken of key speakers including Park Yoon-kyu, Vice Minister of Science and ICT, and Woo Byung-hyun, CEO of Asia Economy, at the 'Get Ready Web3.0, The 1st Mega-scale Artificial Intelligence (AI) Ecosystem Opening' forum hosted by Asia Economy. This forum, held for the first time this year, invites renowned experts from the information and communication technology (ICT) industry to showcase corporate technological capabilities and explore future business directions. / Seongnam = Photo by Kim Hyun-min kimhyun81@

[Asia Economy Reporter Lim Hye-seon] The historic Go match in 2016 between 9-dan Lee Sedol and Google DeepMind's artificial intelligence (AI) AlphaGo served as a turning point in showcasing AI's potential across industries. Six years later, AI is transforming our daily lives. AI is actively involved in unmanned customer centers and care for the super-aged population. In particular, ultra-large AI, which is expected to bring structural innovation across the economy and society, is gaining attention.

On the 27th, Asia Economy held the 'Get Ready Web3.0, 1st Ultra-large Artificial Intelligence (AI) Ecosystem Opening' forum at the Gravity Hotel in Pangyo, inviting AI experts to forecast the market and assess technological capabilities. 'Ultra-large AI' refers to next-generation AI capable of comprehensive reasoning like humans by learning large-scale data autonomously.

Woo Byung-hyun, CEO of Asia Economy, said in his opening remarks, "The world is moving from the Web 2.0 era centered on media content to the Web 3.0 era," adding, "In the Web 3.0 era, people will freely use all information worldwide across time and space, and ultra-large AI lays the foundation for this." He continued, "Ultra-large AI heralds a civilizational change that can transform our daily lives and bring structural innovation across the economy and society."

Following this, Park Yoon-kyu, 2nd Vice Minister of the Ministry of Science and ICT, said in his congratulatory speech, "If we secure world-class capabilities in artificial intelligence, data, networks, and cloud, our industry, which has been stuck in a low-growth trap, can take a leap forward." He added, "The government plans to establish legal and institutional foundations such as the AI Basic Act and the Metaverse Special Act to realize a new digital economic society." He also urged, "To become a model country in the digital era, it is important to unite the capabilities of the private sector and government and encourage the challenges and bold investments of innovative companies."

In a special lecture titled 'Directions for AI Technology Development and Future Prospects,' Lee Yoon-geun, Director of the AI Research Institute at the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI), emphasized, "The post-COVID-19 world is a 'complete digital society,' with AI-based digital transformation technology at its core." He noted, "Since the late 2000s, the development of algorithms (deep learning) has driven the rapid growth of AI," and added, "The core now is next-generation AI that can communicate with humans, grow autonomously, and perceive situations."

Lee defined the present as the 'Singularity era,' stating, "Deep learning requires large-scale training data for each field and continuous adaptation to dynamically changing environments, which is a limitation," and emphasized, "It is necessary to strengthen foundational technologies such as big data, computing, and networks, as well as application service capabilities for AI service innovation." Singularity is a term symbolizing the future brought by the convergence of AI and the Internet of Things, meaning the point at which AI surpasses human intelligence.

Lee stressed that the government is actively investing in securing core next-generation AI technologies. Over the next five years, about 20 projects will be researched and developed, including self-directed AI technology that solves new problems creatively, AI technology that incrementally learns new knowledge while retaining past knowledge, and multimodal interaction AI technology that has sociality and communicates with humans. Representative ultra-large AIs include Google's (DeepMind) Switch Transformer and OpenAI's GPT-3. Domestic companies include Naver's HyperCLOVA, Kakao Brain's KoGPT, and LG's ExaONE.

At the forum, speakers such as Kim Young-jun, head of SK Telecom's AI Promotion Team; Jang Doo-sung, head of KT AI2XL Research Institute; Ha Jung-woo, head of Naver AI Lab; and Kim Kwang-seop, CTO of Kakao Brain, examined the current state and future of the AI ecosystem.