Shocks from an AI unicorn in Japan

Korea can take a leading position in the global AI market only when the country nurtures its iconic AI unicorns.

LEE SOO-HWAThe author is a professor at the AI Convergence Research Institute of Hallym University. The number of unicorn companies from each country has emerged as an indicator of national power, as significant as the GDP and military power. A unicorn is a startup with a value of more than $1 billion, achieved within 10 years.

Japan seemed to fall behind in the global AI competition. But recently, a remarkable thing happened. A unicorn named Sakana AI has emerged. The scientist AI the company released as open source automates the entire process of finding ideas, experiments, writing theses and review.

Sakana AI is a venture company co-founded by former Google engineers Llion Jones and David Ha in Tokyo in August 2023. Sakana AI’s success can be confirmed in the list of investors. Global companies and notable figures participated, including Lux Capital and Khosla Ventures of the United States, NTT, KDDI and Sony of Japan, and Jeff Dean of Google and Clément Delangue of Hugging Face.

Half of the 220 unicorns in the AI field are American. There is no Korean company yet. Korea’s AI development relative to the GDP falls behind Israel and Singapore. Korean unicorns are concentrated in the IT-based consumer goods sector, such as Kurly, Musinsa, Zigbang and Yanolja.

Then, what would it take for Korea to foster globally competitive AI companies like OpenAI of the United States, Mistral AI of France and Sakana AI of Japan? Human resources, infrastructure and capital markets are all required in combination. In particular, AI algorithm research requires genius talents who can focus on the work for a long time. For example, we need talented people like Ilya Sutskever, former chief technology officer of OpenAI. In addition, developing complex AI models calls for enormous equipment and data costs from the early stage.

Long-term investment is a necessary condition for success. For long-term investments, national support and global alliance should create synergy. As Geoffrey Hinton, called the father of deep learning, emphasizes, true research is a challenging and uncertain task. Support from the government is a great help when confronting that uncertainty. The Japanese government actively helped Sakana AI resolve its early issues with equipment through the government’s generative AI development assistant program called GENIAC.

AI development is also a global project and open source is at the center of it. Geoffrey Hinton has experienced both failures and successes in the artificial neural network research for 40 years. His conclusion is that solidarity through open source can increase the chance of success.

Sakana AI is a refreshing stimulus to Korea. Korea can take a leading position in the global AI market only when the country nurtures its iconic AI unicorns.