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.
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…