'Second Gyeongbu Expressway' Only Possible for the State

The AI transformation of industry and society as a whole requires massive infrastructure investment beforehand. Director Hong Ki-bin emphasized that there are many necessary investments for the future, even if profitability is not yet apparent. Such investments are difficult for private financial institutions, which pursue short-term profits, to undertake.

State-led investment aims not to rescue specific private companies, but to create infrastructure necessary for society as a whole. It is an attempt by the state to inject funds through social consensus into areas where private companies or financial institutions are reluctant to act due to a lack of profitability, and thereby create new sources of profit.

Refining and combining this data for AI transformation could create immense infrastructure in visual media and content. However, such data refinement is costly and difficult, leading to a tendency for Korean AI to rely on Chinese AI due to a lack of high-quality data. Therefore, it is urgent for the state to lead in building high-quality datasets.

To ensure consistent long-term investment regardless of changes in government, experts, including Professor Blanchard, are proposing to separate the general budget from investment accounts. This is analogous to constructing a 'second Gyeongbu Expressway' for the new era, much like how the seemingly reckless Gyeongbu Expressway became a major industrial driver.

Director Hong Ki-bin stated that he personally feels the productivity improvement, as research that took two days a decade ago can now be done in two to three hours thanks to AI. The presence or absence of such AI infrastructure can lead to significant disparities in individual and societal productivity and efficiency.

If Korea fails to build its own AI infrastructure, or 'sovereign AI,' its data dependence on global big tech companies like Google, Anthropic, and OpenAI could deepen. By separating capital accounts for long-term investment, building sovereign AI is essential to secure economic and sovereign autonomy. This is a crucial national effort to enable the use of proprietary AI without paying foreign companies.

Such AI can provide optimized information to specialists in specific fields and achieve qualitative differentiation in Korean-related data that foreign-language models struggle to provide. This is the path to creating AI with superior intelligence that reflects the unique characteristics of Korean society.

Similar to how Naver search is optimized for Korean local information, this contributes to increasing social productivity by reflecting Korea's unique characteristics. Furthermore, it provides a data foundation that foreign companies must utilize when entering the Korean market.

A real-world example is combining Korea Land and Geospatial Information Corporation's land data with AI to create innovative changes. Inputting a specific parcel provides all necessary information for solar panel installation on that parcel, including annual sunshine, land regulations, and agricultural land status, through integrated analysis. Utilizing AI in this way automates decision-making processes and significantly enhances efficiency, greatly reducing the time and effort spent on complex information analysis.

This is a critique of indiscriminate AI development competition and raises fundamental questions about how much resources humanity should invest. Experts warn about the financial and economic impact of uncontrollable resource input.

The AI technology race is likely to see an exponential increase in resources invested. As AI progresses from Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) to Artificial Superintelligence (ASI), resource consumption could multiply tens of times, leading to an uncontrollable situation. If a significant portion of global economic resources is concentrated solely on AI development, serious problems could arise, so politicians must recognize the risks of such unrealistic resource input and seek countermeasures.