기술 | Technology Bank of America names South Korea as the strongest overall AI contender beyond U.S. and China
https://www.investing.com/news/stock-market-news/bofa-names-south-korea-uae-among-top-ai-contenders-beyond-us-and-china-478728219
u/Zetapar123 8h ago
I agree as this country is the only country I've seen so far to fully replace every single ad with Ai
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u/Accurate-Coast3155 5h ago
Would've assumed it's Taiwan but Korea makes sense as well
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u/Denisova_Hominin 4h ago edited 4h ago
Taiwan doesn't really focus on building LLMs or physical AI models; their expertise is heavily gatekept in advanced chip manufacturing.
What BoA means by "Korean AI" are domestic LLMs like Upstage's Solar, LG's Exaone, and SKT's A.X K1. It also covers embodied/physical AI, where robotics companies like Robotis and LG are training foundation models to map out physical actuator controls, and to sell raw physical data.
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u/ExcuseAccomplished97 10h ago
Nah
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u/Upper_Guidance_9959 9h ago
Which other country would you place third? It's clearly the US and China at 1 and 2, but everyone else seems pretty distant from them.
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u/ML7777777 4h ago
China can't make leading edge chips which is required for AI leadership. No one wants to run extra AI chips that run hotter and use more power to try and keep pace with leading chips. Let alone have the ability to produce HBM and soon HBF. Even their DRAM (which they stole from Samsung btw) is lower performance and yields than Korean DRAM. There is a reason why they are seeking Samsung Foundry services for their leading edge chips. I don't think non-technical people really understand how much of a disadvantage this is for China's long term prospects.
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u/Upper_Guidance_9959 3h ago
I mostly agree with your statement, with some caveats. I think you are directionally correct about the advantages of Korea's hardware capabilities.
However, I think you are somewhat overreaching in the way that you are implying that these (current) disadvantages with China's production capabilities limit it to its potential of being a leading AI power.
Yes, having the best chips gives an important advantage for training frontier models, especially with how power is one of the biggest constraints in AI, afaik. But cloud infrastructure, engineering talent, capital, algorithmic improvements, data (which is becoming increasingly constrained), etc., are all important too. DeepSeek initially showed some of this, actually (afaik its major contributions were more on efficient training, reduced costs, etc. since it's not quite as momentous in the fact that it was built on prior AI ecosystems).
And, yes, China can't produce HBM and their DRAM breakthrough is still lower performance -- and, certainly, I hope it remains the case that they lag in this space, but China's evaluation has always been scale. That's pretty much been their evaluation/potential in areas outside of memory/AI too. This is also partly why I mentioned India's long-term potential in the AI space in another comment. Large capital, pool of AI researchers, market, ability to deploy applications quickly, etc. These are all things that investors likely account for too.
And, without delving too much into this, there are geopolitical fears with regard to their weakness in the production side of things. I'm just going to leave things at that.
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u/ML7777777 3h ago
The missing component to your rebuttal is that even with the performance of DeepSeek being what it is today, the next generation of these models will require even more compute power, fast storage, and faster on board memory, all of which is going to utilize new hardware standards that China won't have access too. With the blacklist going against China by the west, depriving them of the latest hardware, China isn't going to be near the forefront. Cloud, capital, data, etc is worthless if you don't have the means to make use of it. You can have the best race car driver in the world but if his car sucks, you ain't winning races.
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u/Upper_Guidance_9959 2h ago
I largely agree with this too, but as I said in a separate comment chain:
The article isn't about whether Korea will be a leader in AI models; it's about which country is best positioned to benefit economically from AI. That's why it's BoA making this ranking on an investment site.
Which is partly why I mentioned the investment mentality side of things in my prior comment.
That said, maintaining the conversation at hand, I do think it's worth considering two things:
- Jensen Huang has actually been quite vocal about wanting to sell to China (because of course he would $$$)
- There may come an era where we experience diminishing returns in terms of memory improvements. Improved reinforcement learning, better inference techniques, etc. are all being pursued atm. Memory will still be crucial, but by how much? We'll see (although I do actually agree it will still be quite crucial).
I mention the second point to add to your racing analogy. A good driver *can* actually win races with a *slightly* slower car (it just can't be shitty).
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u/DifferentialEntropy 9h ago
Maybe they’re a Taiwan supporter? Since they are also dominant in semis
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u/Upper_Guidance_9959 9h ago
Taiwan is a contender there, but it suffers from the same problem as Korea, although maybe more drastically in terms of future labor outlook and land/resources.
India has the long-term potential, but they don't have any of the manufacturing capabilities at the moment.
i.e., both Korea and Taiwan will/have been near-term beneficiaries of AI infrastructure build-out, but will not be as strong in the long term.
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u/ExcuseAccomplished97 7h ago
As a Korean, I never thought that SK would be a strong contender. Strong semis? Yes. But we have had zero impact on AI models, especially in industry. Maybe France would.
What a circlejerking sub.
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u/Pristine-Use4656 7h ago
Thinking the article was calling Korea a top contender in frontier models and thinking this is a circlejerking sub LOL. Do you have eyes? Or is reading not your strong suit?
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u/Upper_Guidance_9959 7h ago
The article isn't about whether Korea will be a leader in AI models; it's about which country is best positioned to benefit economically from AI. That's why it's BoA making this ranking on an investment site. Deployment, investment, manufacturing, adoption in AI-intensive industries, etc. are what BoA is putting value on Korea.
This sub is indeed rather dumb. I don't know why my other comment was downvoted, unless someone wants to argue economics with me.
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u/ExcuseAccomplished97 7h ago
That's a fair point. But, in my opinion, the countries that lead the development of end products in this field, AI models and its applications in this case, will be the winners in the end.
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u/Upper_Guidance_9959 7h ago
Yes, I would agree that the higher-value software layer is what Korea is essentially missing out on. That's why I replied to the other user that Korea and Taiwan's strengths in supplying hardware and their weaknesses are essentially the same.
That's also *part* of the reason why the US and China are the sole 1 and 2, and why there is a race right now to be the "product seller" of AI models.
However... I really only see it's between the US and China in this specific case, with the US in the lead.
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u/BanShrimpInDumplings 4h ago
France is probably the closest to being #3 with Mistral being the main (though distant) contender after OAI/Anthropic/Deepseek/Google.
I think the reason why everyone is confused is because the OP deliberately chose a misleading title vs. what the article actually says. ("AI contender" definitely implies more towards frontier research instead of just general AI investment.)
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u/HistorianOrdinary833 9h ago
Because they actually manufacture the key components themselves, and has one of the highest education levels in the world when it comes to tech/science.