SoftBank Group Chairman and CEO Masayoshi Son meets with South Korean President Lee Jae Myung on Friday in Seoul. SEOUL - SoftBank Group Chairman and CEO Masayoshi Son met with South Korean President Lee Jae Myung on Friday to discuss cooperation in the fields of artificial intelligence and semiconductors, as well as infrastructure investment. Cooperation between South Korea and Japan in the field of AI is very important, Lee said, expressing his hope that the Japanese technology investor will play the role of a bridge between the two nations. The Lee administration has launched an initiative to make South Korea one of the world's top three AI powers. Building an "AI expressway," in which AI infrastructure and data are expanded and connected as a network, is a national project for the administration. At the meeting held at the presidential office in Seoul, Lee said that AI can be used as infrastructure, like water supply systems and roads, while expressing his gratitude to Son for providing considerable support and advice to South Korea for its tariff negotiations with U.S. President Donald Trump's administration.

DeepSeek, a Chinese artificial intelligence startup, has temporarily paused downloads of its chatbot apps in South Korea while it works with local authorities to address privacy concerns, according to South Korean officials on Monday. South Korea's Personal Information Protection Commission said DeepSeek's apps were removed from the local versions of Apple's App Store and Google Play on Saturday evening and that the company agreed to work with the agency to strengthen privacy protections before relaunching the apps. Read More: Is the DeepSeek Panic Overblown? The action does not affect users who have already downloaded DeepSeek on their phones or use it on personal computers. Nam Seok, director of the South Korean commission's investigation division, advised South Korean users of DeepSeek to delete the app from their devices or avoid entering personal information into the tool until the issues are resolved.

At least 100 North Korean troops deployed to Russia have been killed, with another 1,000 injured in combat against Ukrainian forces in intense fighting in the Kursk region, a South Korean lawmaker said on Thursday citing the country's spy agency. The heavy losses are attributed to the lack of experience by North Korean troops in drone warfare and unfamiliarity with the open terrain where they are taking part in the battle, a member of parliament Lee Seong-kweun told reporters. Lee was speaking after a closed-door briefing by the National Intelligence Service (NIS) to parliament.

A laser beam downs drones by heating up and "frying" their electronics – each invisible, soundless "shot" is more precise and less costly than an air defence missile. Hanwha Aerospace, a South Korean defence company, has fire-tested and is about to start mass-producing the world's first-ever optical fibre laser weapon. And Hanwha is ready to supply it to Ukraine if Seoul lifts a ban on the export of lethal weapons to Kyiv "in light of North Korean military activities", South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol said in late October. His statement followed North Korea's deployment of about 10,000 soldiers to western Russia, becoming the first foreign power to step into the Russia-Ukrainian war. However, the US president-elect may stand in the way.

The South Korean police began investigating messaging app Telegram for the first time for its alleged negligence over deepfake-related sex crimes, Yonhap News reported, citing a briefing from the head of National Office of Investigation. The probe was launched by the Seoul Metropolitan Police and like in other countries, Telegram has been uncooperative in sharing materials with the authorities, investigation office head Woo Jong-soo said, according to Yonhap on Monday. South Korea is doing its best to deploy its own investigating tools to extract the materials, Yonhap said, citing Woo. The investigation comes less than a week after the South Korean government asked Telegram and other social media companies to delete deepfake images from their platforms after an increase in such content. President Yoon Suk-yeol last week described deepfake as a "clear crime" and ordered officials to take stern actions to counter it.

The AI Fringe returned for a second year on 5 June. The event was designed to complement the AI Seoul Summit which was co-hosted by the UK and South Korea governments. The goals of the AI Fringe are 1) to bring together the views of industry, civil society and academia on safe and beneficial AI, 2) to provide a platform for all communities to engage in the discussion, 3) to enhance understanding of AI and its impacts so organisations can harness its benefits. This year, the Fringe comprised a half-day event with the key elements being two panel discussions. The first addressed AI safety, and the panel reflected on progress over the last 12 months.

Sixteen companies at the forefront of developing artificial intelligence (AI) pledged on Tuesday at a global meeting to develop the technology safely at a time when regulators are scrambling to keep up with rapid innovation and emerging risks. The companies included U.S. leaders Google, Meta, Microsoft and OpenAI, as well as firms from China, South Korea and the United Arab Emirates. They were backed by a broader declaration from the Group of Seven (G7) major economies, the EU, Singapore, Australia and South Korea at a virtual meeting hosted by British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol.

South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol on Monday called fake news and disinformation based on AI and digital technology threats to democracy, as some officials attending a global summit accused Russia and China of conducting malicious propaganda campaigns. Speaking at the opening of the Summit for Democracy being held in Seoul, Yoon said countries had a duty to share experiences and wisdom so that artificial intelligence and technology could be employed to promote democracy. "Fake news and disinformation based on artificial intelligence and digital technology not only violates individual freedom and human rights but also threatens democratic systems," Yoon said.

The recent advances of deep learning have dramatically changed how machine learning, especially in the domain of natural language processing, can be applied to legal domain. However, this shift to the data-driven approaches calls for larger and more diverse datasets, which are nevertheless still small in number, especially in non-English languages. Here we present the first large-scale benchmark of Korean legal AI datasets, LBOX OPEN, that consists of one legal corpus, two classification tasks, two legal judgement prediction (LJP) tasks, and one summarization task. The legal corpus consists of 147k Korean precedents (259M tokens), of which 63k are sentenced in last 4 years and 96k are from the first and the second level courts in which factual issues are reviewed. The two classification tasks are case names (11.3k) and statutes (2.8k) prediction from the factual description of individual cases. The LJP tasks consist of (1) 10.5k criminal examples where the model is asked to predict fine amount, imprisonment with labor, and imprisonment without labor ranges for the given facts, and (2) 4.7k civil examples where the inputs are facts and claim for relief and outputs are the degrees of claim acceptance. The summarization task consists of the Supreme Court precedents and the corresponding summaries (20k). We also release realistic variants of the datasets by extending the domain (1) to infrequent case categories in case name (31k examples) and statute (17.7k) classification tasks, and (2) to long input sequences in the summarization task (51k). Finally, we release LCUBE, the first Korean legal language model trained on the legal corpus from this study. Given the uniqueness of the Law of South Korea and the diversity of the legal tasks covered in this work, we believe that LBOX OPEN contributes to the multilinguality of global legal research. LBOX OPEN and LCUBE will be publicly available.

The South Korean government shared roughly 170 million face images of citizens and resident foreign nationals with the private sector without their consent to be used in training and testing biometric algorithms, according to a recent Ministry of Justice document. The move is part of an "AI identification and tracking system development project" based on a memorandum of understanding between the Korean Ministry of Justice (MOJ) and the Ministry of Science and ICT (MSIT). Scheduled for completion in 2022, the project has seen the MOJ transferring information obtained during the immigration screening process to the MSIT, including face biometrics, nationality, gender, and age. The MSIT subsequently transferred that information to private businesses for the purpose of artificial intelligence technology research, according to the allegations. The South Korean government mentioned the creation of the project in a press release when it first launched in 2019 but did not disclose information about its structure, scope, or data collection methods.