Borderless Alliances
An artificial intelligence (AI) alliance fever is gripping not only companies in countries taking the lead in the AI sector but IT companies and academia in Korea, China and Japan. This fever is being fueled by a severe scarcity of AI specialists and developers at companies. This phenomenon hints at their will to come up with ideas to make an improvement to the current industrial policy structure subject to various regulations and build practical new industrial systems based on the results of joint R&D.
According to relevant industries on October 4, the AI Research Institute jointly invested in by seven Korean firms -- Samsung Electronics, Hyundai Motors, Naver, SK Telecom, KT, LG Electronics and Hanwha Life –- will officially inaugurate at the Global R&D Center in Pangyo in Gyeonggi-do on October 11.
Intelligence information technology is a concept which generalizes AI and ICBM (internet of things, cloud computing, big data and mobile). First of all, the AIRI will concentrate on investing companies’ new industrial sectors such as smart homes, self-driving cars and fintech.
Moreover, Greg Corrado, a senior research scientist and tech lead at Google in charge of machine learning at the global search giant, the CTO of China’s Alibaba and research fellows of AI research centers in Japan and Germany among others will make presentations in an international symposium on AI that will parallel the opening ceremony on October 11. With this international forum as momentum, the AIRI will inform the world’s AI academia of the inauguration of the AIRI and actively attract Korean and foreign AI specialists and developers, the AIRI explained.
In actuality, regardless of business sectors, corporate heavyweights such as Toyota, NEC and NTT in Japan are giving impetus to the development of AI while partnering with academia. Like the AIRI, they set a short-term goal of applying AI to production lines, medical diagnosis and treatment systems of participating companies. There is an AI commercialization boom among the AI industry, academia and research centers with Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent as front runners with policy support from the government in China which has the second largest number of AI technology patents after the US in the world.
In particular, competition to preoccupy AI technology and secure market leadership among nations will be intensified with an era of AI specialists as a watershed. This is because the full-scale introduction of AI to the medical, legal and manufacturing sectors which are B2B areas simply means the generation of profits.