I still think this stupid. Korea lacks the financial might of the US and bottomless talent pool of China. If they want to stand a chance, they'd be better off forming a consortium of universities, government, and the *chaebols* and poling their collective capabilities into a unified model (preferably open).
Upon completion it would automatically have buy-in by powerful institutions and key individuals, who all immediately have understanding of how it works. So the deployment of this "sovereign" would also be far faster and cheaper.
There is practically zero chance South Korea will have the research talent to match the US or China in the near future.
Compute, sure, it can be built out with government support, but the research gap is huge and won’t be bridged.
Being a fast follower is already a huge achievement but it’s only made possible by standing on the shoulders of existing research, it is a pure fantasy that anything useful can be “built from scratch.”
Maybe we're talking past each other.
A Math Olympiad is similar to military contract in there being a very specific narrow goal with clear objectives. So for every challenge there's only one right answer, and the competitors are judged by how efficiently and quickly they got to it.
In this case, the objective is to be "the best" in Frontier AI. Well what does that actually mean? Because you could end up with a hundred different models that are each "the best" at a hundred different fields, but 99 of them lose out on funding, then that's a huge amount of wasted potential. Imagine a situation where 20 years from now, someone builds a model that improves crop yields by 30%, only to learn a similar discovery was already made in South Korea but abandoned because it was one of the 99 losers for whatever reason.
I'm coming from the belief that South Korea should strive for something like the Linux Foundation for their "sovereign AI" *then* have competitions to build things on top of it. But right now it feels they're trying to create a national equivalent of Microsoft. No doubt it will have its benefits but Linux is *far* more influential and powerful.
Well what's great about it? What makes this winner-takes-all approach better than a collaborative effort?
To me, all this signals is the *chaebols* leveraging their influence to get richer, and any benefits to the nation are useful bonuses. But if that's the point then good for them. Their $20 billion family fortunes will grow to $30 billion, and they can finally call themselves wealthy.
>I still think this stupid. Korea lacks the financial might of the US and bottomless talent pool of China.
And yet with LG alone they are third player in global AI race, while everything that Europe has to show for is underperforming Mistral.
> It's also built from scratch unlike China's Deepseek
lmao, this is like Mistral's CEO yapping about how Deepseek owes so much to Mistral. When you are learning so much from what Deepseek shares you should act with some respect.
Mistral models are quite good? The 24b range especially.
Mistral large is just okay, but so is the 235b one from lg.
One could also note that Europe also have Bfl and the flux image models. As far as I know, Korea only has illustrious? And it’s quite a niche model based on SDXL.
I have not, and am not, saying South Korea *can't* do this. I'm saying instead of trying to create an equivalent to OpenAI they should build something like the Linux Foundation. Pool the combined resources of the nation towards a single core project, the build out application and forks from there.
Unless there's some nuance about Korea that I'm missing, I fail to see the disadvantages of concerted national effort.
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