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From the left: Kakao Brain President Park Seung-ki, SK Telecom CTO Kim Yoon, and Woo Kyeong-koo, director of AI at Samsung Electronics, vow to collaborate on AI research in Seongnam, Gyeonggi Province, on Dec. 22. (provided by Kakao)

SK Telecom (SKT), Kakao, and Samsung Electronics plan to join forces on developing artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze COVID-19 threats in real time and predict movement patterns. They aim to launch the service in the first half of 2021.

This is part of a greater trend of cooperation and competition among Korean and overseas IT firms to develop core AI technology for next-generation industries. It signals a wind of change for companies that had previously focused exclusively on their own independent technology development.

On Dec. 22, SKT, Kakao, and Samsung Electronics announced that they were forming an “AI research and development consultative group” to “develop AI for solutions for the COVID-19 era.” Meeting at SKT’s offices in Pangyo, in Seongnam, Gyeonggi Province, AI research directors for the three firms said they would “pool each company’s key capacities to jointly develop future AI technology, research AI usages for resolving social issues, and expand the country’s AI technology base.”

Their first collaboration is an effort to use AI to overcome the COVID-19 pandemic, with a launch planned for the first half of next year. The technology analyzes infection threats for a user’s current position, using it to provide social distancing recommendations or suggest routes to avoid the threats. The companies also plan to apply the technology in other disaster situations such as typhoons and heavy rains. They aim to provide the technology in the form of an application programming interface (API) so that other developers, research institutions, and companies can freely incorporate it into their services.

The companies’ cooperation was inspired by remarks made by SKT CEO Park Jung-ho. Speaking at the 2020 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas last January, Park said, “For South Korea to claim the advantage in the global AI war, we need cooperation over competition among South Korean firms.” Emphasizing cooperation in an industry where “competition is everything,” Park made a strong impact. Two months later in March, the three companies formed a working group to conduct concrete discussions toward joint research. SKT and Kakao had previously laid the groundwork for an alliance in October 2019 with an exchange of shares valued at 300 billion won (US$270.5 million).

It’s not unusual for IT companies to come together around AI. It was over four years ago in September 2016 that Google, Facebook, Amazon, IBM, Microsoft, and others formed a partnership to conduct in-depth research on AI and establish future technology standards. In South Korea, an industry-academia-research consultative group called “AI One Team” was launched last February by KT, the Hyundai Heavy Industries Group, KAIST, Hanyang University, and the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI).

“While it’s fine to have competition at the stage of services that are developed through the application of technology, the AI that serves as the foundation for those services is potentially more powerful when it’s made by several firms working together rather than one party developing it alone,” said Zhang Byoung-tak, professor of computer engineering at Seoul National University.

“Since AI can teach itself to improve performance, it’s more effective the more resources you put into it,” he suggested.

By Choi Min-young and Song Chae Kyung-hwa, staff reporters

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