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🚨 BREAKING: South Korea is launching its “Sovereign AI” initiative, with the goal of rivaling the U.S. and China by 2027. Many are not paying attention, but the new AI nationalism is spreading fast:
When announcing the new initiative, a Korean Minister said, “the AI industry is fundamentally a winner-takes-all market dominated by a few high-performance companies,” adding that their goal is to be one of the world’s top three AI leaders, and position themselves as an alternative to American and Chinese models.
South Korea chose five top teams to build their national AI models, and the government invested $383 million in the project. It’s an internal competition, and the government will evaluate each team’s AI model every 6 months, eliminating one team at a time. Only 2 teams will remain by 2027.
From chips to data centers, the goal is to mainly utilize NATIONAL resources to develop the national model.
This reflects what I’ve been pointing out in my newsletter: AI is making a new form of nationalism emerge, which intersects technology, politics, economy, culture, ethics, and law.
There have been many examples of the new AI nationalism, including the U.S. (check out my article on its AI Action Plan), Switzerland (check out my recent post on the Swiss LLM), Germany, the UK, Singapore, China, and more.
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As I wrote in my newsletter before, national AI efforts might help countries advance their local AI infrastructure, strengthen regulatory and governance efforts on AI, and preserve their language and culture in the context of AI development and deployment.
Despite the potential benefits of national efforts on AI, it’s indispensable that global AI efforts remain, and that we attempt to reach some level of AI governance consensus worldwide.
*To be sincere, the possibility of a meaningful framework for “global AI governance” is sounding more and more like a utopia than a plan, but hopefully the world will manage to reach some level of consensus.
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