About a quarter of South Koreans already pay for AI services, compared to just 2% of Americans
South Korea is preparing to offer free generative AI services to its entire population, using the technology to help people handle everyday tasks such as booking medical appointments, finding housing, and sorting out taxes.
The program is intended to expand access to homegrown AI systems while giving the government a larger role in how they are used for everyday services.
RIP Korean students in formative years learning critical thinking and social skills.
Govt-funded Chatbot about to gaslight them that every idea and question is genius-level, and that social connections are something a computer can fulfil.
What students? They’ve been shutting down school because they have no students to teach. They are on the leading edge of a demographic trend the ‘developed’ world will soon see.
Care to explain? Sounds interesting, my last impression was that SK was a society with massive competitive pressure in education and career. What happened?
There aren’t any children being made. Therefore no students to teach. Same is happening all over the world but way higher pace in SK. It’s easy to forget how shitty their society can be with the glitz of k-pop culture distracting us. I don’t mean that as an insult specific to Korea. Many other countries look great from the outside but is never without issues.
Younger person looking at their own society collapse around them because having children is too expensive: at least this old generation will take their stupid dogma with them along with their institutional knowledge of machining, woodworking, trades, etc.
Older person looking at their own society collapse around them because having children is too expensive: at least we made the dogma stick!
It’s all related. Massive societal pressure = no time for children. No time for children means birth rates are significantly below replacement rate. At first the issue was ignorable. Now it’s not. Cracks are starting to show. With so few children, nobody is “picking up the torch” for virtually very industry, and whatever workers are left are dwindling as they retire.
You see a similar thing happening in Japan, too. And a similar issue is occurring in America and Europe, though their situation is not as bad in comparison. It’s speculated that all advanced economies will eventually face this challenge, but South Korea is really trying to speedrun total societal collapse
This is home.grown south-korean AI we’re talkong about here. It will never be satisfied with anything you do and will always criticize you no matter how good you are.
You know that you can use ChatGPT for free, right? Also, paid plans aren’t so expensive that a student couldn’t afford one.
If you think free access is the only thing between students using AI and learning traditionally, I’m afraid you will be disappointed.
Free AI won’t change much for most people, except that the government can choose what models the citizens will use. This way they can be independent of US companies dominating the market.
No token limit? Haah sure… Let’s see for how long.
In unrelated news, VPN usage to South Korea spikes
That certainly would happen if it was just open access for any South Korean IP address.
What I think is equally likely is that this will require some government ID to access, and hoo boy does that open a dystopian can of worms.
Yes but something I remember from 20 years ago… Maybe 15, is trying to sign up to okay a Korean mmo. I had the whole thing downloaded and ready to go, but one problem, in order to make an account I needed to enter my SK ID number. I spent like 4 hours trying to get around this check but the rabbit hole that led me down eventually taught me that this is normal in SK. I could be wrong, I’m a USian and don’t speak or read Korean, but it sure seemed like they were being required to give their version of an SSN to access an mmo.
Not good imo, but if I understood correctly entering some form of government ID wouldn’t be a dramatic change from the norm.
There are numbers that are intended to be semi public, like if you have a sales tax ID number you give that to everyone. Ssn being private is just a dumb mistake in the first place.
That’s not the issue though. The issue is that the mmo account is now linked with your identity, not that the ID is.
South Korea already has nationwide online identity verification.
It’ll probably be like unlimited internet.
At 50kbit/s.
I’m reminded of something I saw last year.
The services are expected to connect to government systems rather than function solely as standalone chatbots. Residents will be able to use them to book doctor appointments, search for apartments, and get tax guidance. Small businesses will be able to calculate taxes and check whether they qualify for government support. Parents will receive recommendations for educational content.
I doubt if any of this is a good idea. Put my trust in an LLM, and specifically for the more important aspects of my life? Not for me. But maybe people will. I have learned I’m bad at predicting the masses.
The government plans to distribute up to 512 Nvidia B200 chips among the three consortia and help cover operating costs.
That seems like a very low number for a population of 50’000’000 of which a fourth is currently paying for AI access. I mean it’s less than what would be in sixteen NVL36x2 racks. That’s like one aisle in a data center. And they want to split it over three groups… okay?
I am beginning to wonder if this is a genuine attempt, or if they just want to pump the KOSPI, since Samsung and SK Hynix profit so much off of selling shovels (the shovels are memory in this case).
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You’d be surprised how far it goes when you aren’t doing training. I’m serving an entire university on 1/2 of a 6000B
Maybe that’s the plan for giving unlimited token access: responses capped at 1 token per second
This is an interesting approach. It depends who owns and provides the compute. If it’s the state or one of Korea’s quasi-private firms Samsung/LG/Hyundai that are effectively a part of the state, then this could have some positive outcomes in encouraging use cases that don’t seek profit maximization for the compute providers. In such a reality people could actually apply LLMs to productivity-increasing use cases in all sorts of sectors.
I do think it is healthy for a country to have their own AI for their people. I think they are way better off keeping their own data in their own country.
And I do love some LLM - but I don’t think the general population actually better with it…
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Lol they are pumping hard.
“That’s a great question, Do-yun, and of course I can look after that for you! In the meantime, why don’t you and the Mrs keep on with that making babies task the government set?”
Why though 💀
