Locally developing large-scale AI is matter of digital sovereignty: expert

Amid the accelerating artificial intelligence (AI) race worldwide, developing a large-scale AI with domestic technologies is a matter of securing digital sovereignty, said a Naver Cloud executive.

Yoo Young-joon, Wrtn Technologies co-founder and chief operating officer, speaks during the Generative AI Asia 2023 conference held in southern Seoul, Wednesday. [WRTN TECHNOLOGIES]

Amid the accelerating artificial intelligence (AI) race worldwide, developing a large-scale AI with domestic technologies is a matter of securing digital sovereignty, said a Naver Cloud executive.

“If Korea fails to build its own AI technologies, the ladder will be kicked away, which would make it impossible for us to have the capabilities” in the future, said Sung Na-ko, head of Hyperscale AI at Naver Cloud, highlighting the economic significance of securing AI technologies.

Sung's comment was made during the Generative AI Asia 2023 conference Wednesday, Asia’s biggest-ever generative AI event hosted by Wrtn Technologies, a Seoul-based AI start-up.

The conference, in its first year, took place at Grand InterContinental Seoul Parnas hotel in southern Seoul, featuring speakers from Naver Cloud, Kakao Brain, Hugging Face, Microsoft, AWS and more.

During the keynote speech of the event, Lee Se-young, Wrtn Technologies CEO and founder, introduced Wrtn Plugins.

Wrtn Plugins integrates various services and data provided by partnering companies with generative AI technology to come up with more useful information for users. A total of 21 companies, including Hana Financial Group, KB Financial Group, Gmarket, Zigbang and Amorepacific, partnered with Wrtn for the Plugins service.

The Plugins service will be available starting in June.

“Wrtn Plugins overcomes the limitations of the existing AI models and expand its potential, connecting AI with the world in the next portal,” said Lee.

Also presented on stage was the company’s no-coding AI builder tool, Wrtn Studio, aimed at enhancing accessibility for AI development. Users will be able to distribute the AI services they developed with Wrtn Studio through Wrtn’s app store, Wrtn Store, according to the company.

Wrtn Technologies' prompt engineer, Kang Su-jin, also took to the stage, after the company posted a job opening for a prompt engineer promising a maximum salary of 100 million won ($75,609) per year in March.

It was the first public job opening for a prompt engineering position in Korea.

“We need a new way of communication in order to engage with AI, and that is what prompt engineering is,” said Kang, who has a Ph.D. in Korean linguistics with expertise in conversation analysis, interactional linguistics and big data analytics in language research.

Kang Su-jin, a prompt engineer at Wrtn Technologies, speaks during the Generative AI Asia 2023 conference held in southern Seoul, Wednesday. [WRTN TECHNOLOGIES]

Kim Gyu-bin, a machine learning engineer at Wrtn Technologies who spearheaded the hiring process, described a prompt engineer as “an AI psychologist.”

“We do think that the sudden popularity of the word ‘prompt engineer’ might be a fleeting thing, but their capabilities will not go anywhere” even after the trend dwindles, and will continue to contribute to building AI products and services, said Kim during a press conference held ahead of the Generative AI Asia 2023.

BY SHIN HA-NEE [shin.hanee@joongang.co.kr]