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The rise of generative artificial intelligence is redefining and reshaping the global economy. Many countries, including Korea, are striving to find the right balance between innovation and regulation while we are examining ways to ensure the safe and responsible development of this technology in the age where even international relations and tensions are around technology, who are able to create and supply it. As the Bren professor of the Department of Computing and Mathematical Sciences at Caltech and a senior director of AI Research at NVIDIA, Professor Anima Anandkumar plays a critical role in the boundary between the technology and industry steering the direction of the future industry landscape. "What I cannot create I do not understand" - Richard Feynman. Generative AI has recently shown astounding abilities to create realistic text, images, and even videos. Does this ability present a big step in our quest to achieve artificial general intelligence? How can this be harnessed to benefit humanity and lead to new scientific inventions and discoveries? What changes will AI technology bring about in the world, and how should we prepare for these changes? What do these transformative changes of our era mean, and what are their implications especially in the industry field? As the world undergoes a significant shift in its economic paradigm, which key issues demand our most urgent attention and discussion? Professor Anandkumar shares her thoughts and insights on how AI will revolutionize the industry and how we can enhance its benefits to humanity.

At a time when economic security has become the deciding factor in a country’s success or lack thereof, technological innovation is more important than ever. History has demonstrated that where technological innovation flourishes, countries thrive; where it is absent, countries soon decline. Moreover, the mechanics behind technological innovation are far from complicated. The key is to ask challenging questions and be relentless in growing scale. As a global tech leader, South Korea must redefine the role of the state. Conditions must be created that enable an outpouring of challenging questions and a continuous scaling up, through continued trial and error, of the outcomes of such questioning. The adoption of an innovation-friendly regulatory framework can also no longer be delayed. Our first course of action must be to apply this very approach of asking challenging questions and scaling up growth to the most difficult challenges we face as ordinary citizens living our daily lives and as a country preparing for the future. In the era of technological innovation, everyone must come together to redefine the work of nations and put our findings into practice.

In the age of technopolitics, where a country's ability to secure cutting-edge technology is a critical determinant of national competitiveness, and amid multiple intersecting crises, what choices and preparations must we make to rewrite our economic paradigm? In this session, we learn more about government plans to address the critical challenges before us and hear thoughtful, responsible responses to our research team's analysis and recommendations.

The age of generative AI has arrived. From deep learning technology in the 2010s to the emergence of generative AI in the 2020s, global Big Tech players as well as local tech companies have started working towards application of AI for services in a range of areas by developing proprietary Large Language Models (LLM) and utilizing external models as well. Demand is high in the industrial sector for AI applications. Yet usable data is still insufficient. Concerns are also being raised about the problem of generative AI hallucinations and bias. Ultimately, what will decide whether and how AI is actually applied in different sectors is data expertise and reliability.

In the aftermath of the generative AI craze sparked by ChatGPT, Large Language Models (LLM) have become the newest industrial trend. Private LLMs, in particular, are being heralded as game changers in the AI market thanks to their ability to learn using only internal company data, which eliminates the risk of data breaches, and the way they have been designed to prevent hallucinations, or the generation of false information. But the LLMs of Big Tech, trained using foreign languages, are weak in their grasp of the Korean language, not to mention Korean cultural sentiments and regional information, which has been an obstacle for advancing private LLMs used by local companies. This was the reason behind Upstage’s launch of the 1T Club, the aim of which is to collect 1 trillion Korean-language tokens, or basic units of text and code, and its efforts to achieve Korean “LLM independence” through the creation of an ecosystem that enables a mutually beneficial interchange between providers of data and the companies creating models. Through “the world's best private LLM, created with the right data,” Upstage seeks to realize AI innovation that will transform Korea’s industrial landscape.

We are in the midst of the Global Transformation, construction of a globalized economic system and society, which began in the 1970s with the neoliberal economics revolution. This has generated a system of rentier capitalism, the triumph of property rights, in which more income goes to 'owners of property' - physical, financial and intellectual - and less to those who rely on labour. There has been a plunder of the commons, and a new globalized class structure with the 'precariat' as the mass class, living in chronic insecurity, in debt, losing the rights of citizenship. AI, driven by financial capital, will not produce mass unemployment, but will increase inequality and insecurity. That is why moving in the direction of a basic income for all is becoming not just a matter of justice but also an economic imperative.

Climate change-induced extreme weather events are wreaking a growing toll, both in physical destruction and the loss and disruption of life, and at an ever-accelerating pace. This is why we describe the time we live in as “the age of climate crisis.” In response, we have seen efforts around the world to foster a new sector called climate technology, defined as the combination of mitigation technologies such as greenhouse gas emission reduction technologies and adaptation technologies to reduce the damage caused by climate change. Korea has also taken steps to accelerate development of its own climate technology sector and transform crisis into opportunity. This session looks at the current status of Korea’s climate technology sector and explores what approaches must be taken to successfully take hold of the opportunities before us.

This session looks at the innovative impacts of AI speech technology on the rapidly growing creator economy. How will this cutting-edge technology empower creators, spur innovation, and open new pathways for economic growth? We will explore the merging of technology and creativity and the ways AI speech technology is helping create a more diverse, innovative, and inclusive economy, celebrating the convergence of AI and the creative economy and marking the transition to a new era of global economic growth.

Can AI be a friend to journalism? While major news outlets overseas have already adopted AI and are utilizing Large Language Models (LLM) in their news reporting, Korea’s journalists are deliberating the questions of how and what to use AI for. SBS has partnered with the data company Underscore to develop Poliscore, the country’s first GPT-based service providing summaries of key political issues. But it is not enough to simply have the technology. This session examines issues and limitations discovered in the course of exploring AI applications for journalism and offers insights into what “AI for journalism” could look like.

The issues of population aging and low birth rates, combined with childbirth at more advanced ages, have led to heightened concerns around living a healthy life. Quality of life clearly suffers as a result of mobility impairments from various health conditions and reduced muscle strength due to muscle loss with aging, but satisfactory solutions have not been easy to find. More recently, however, with rapid advancements in robot technology, physically assistive robots and wearable robots are in the spotlight as potential solutions to mobility impairments and reduced muscle strength. In the physical rehabilitation market, robots are already being introduced at a rapid pace, while at industrial settings wearable suits are being widely used for musculoskeletal protection. This session explores where the emerging wearable robot market is and should be headed and what kind of future we can expect such technology to open for us.

AI, in Martin Ford’s assessment, is on the cusp of becoming a general-purpose technology. The impact of AI will be as profound as that of electricity before it, fundamentally changing how every other technology is produced and consumed, while also helping us solve some of our most pressing issues, from the climate crisis to the next pandemic. Yet for all its promise, AI still has the potential to cause serious harm. Avoiding the overzealous enthusiasm and proselyting displayed by some tech leaders, Ford instead offers audiences a practical, clear-headed guide into AI as it currently stands, as well as its future evolution(s). This nuanced, balanced talk explores both the harms and benefits of the technology, but ultimately remains optimistic: revealing how we can embrace artificial intelligence in the twenty-first century with caution and pragmatism.