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Seoul’s Imported Prophets

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“AI + X = 2F,” reads the banner. “2F,” it turns out, stands for “Future and Force”: not so much a logically coherent formula than an expression of faith. Beneath it, suits, shirts, and T-shirts have gathered for AI Expo Korea 2023, one of many such events in Seoul today, where artificial intelligence has seamlessly replaced the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” as the future du jour. Onstage is a representative from Naver, a local tech giant, previewing their own large language model (LLM). South Korea must seize “AI sovereignty,” they argue, by jumping on board the generative AI train before it’s too late. For modern South Korea, such claims echo a deeply familiar logic of “catch-up innovation.”1 The call for AI sovereignty takes for granted that the current wave of LLMs (large language models) and generative AI from Silicon Valley, led by text/image generation tools like ChatGPT and Midjourney, are the inevitable next step in the march of technological progress—and that everyone else mu

Seoul’s Imported Prophets Sun-ha Hong “AI + X = 2F,” reads the banner. “2F,” it turns out, stands for “Future and Force”: not so much a logically coherent formula than an expression of faith. Beneath it, suits, shirts, and T-shirts have gathered for AI Expo Korea 2023, one of many such events in Seoul today, where artificial intelligence has seamlessly replaced the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” as the future du jour. Onstage is a representative from Naver, a local tech giant, previewing their own large language model (LLM). South Korea must seize “AI sovereignty,” they argue, by jumping on bo

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