OpenAI chief seeks strategic alliances in South Korea
Open AI CEO Sam Altman inked a deal with tech giant Kakao in South Korea on Tuesday as the US firm seeks new alliances after Chinese rival DeepSeek shook the global AI industry. Kakao, which owns an online bank, South Korea's largest taxi-hailing app and KakaoTalk, announced a partnership allowing them to use ChatGPT for its new artificial intelligence services, joining a global alliance led by OpenAI amid intensifying competition in the sector.
Altman's company is part of the Stargate drive announced by US President Donald Trump to invest up to $500 billion in AI infrastructure in the United States. AI newcomer DeepSeek has sent Silicon Valley into a frenzy, with some calling its high performance and supposed low cost a wake-up call for US developers.
Strategic Collaboration
Kakao's CEO Shina Chung said the company was "thrilled" to establish a strategic collaboration with OpenAI. Altman also had meetings with two top South Korean chipmakers, Samsung and SK hynix, both key suppliers of advanced semiconductors used in AI servers.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman explores AI chip collaboration with Samsung - The-Decoder
Future Plans
Altman met with SK Group chairman Chey Tae-won and SK hynix CEO Kwak Noh-jung in Seoul to discuss collaboration on AI memory chips, including high bandwidth memory (HBM), and AI services. He is also expected to meet with Samsung Electronics chairman Lee Jae-yong. The performance of DeepSeek has sparked a wave of accusations that it has reverse-engineered the capabilities of leading US technology, such as the AI powering ChatGPT.
OpenAI warns that Chinese companies are actively attempting to replicate its advanced AI models, prompting closer cooperation with US authorities.
OpenAI says rivals are using a process known as distillation in which developers creating smaller models learn from larger ones by copying their behavior and decision-making patterns -- similar to a student learning from a teacher. The company is facing multiple accusations of intellectual property violations, primarily related to the use of copyrighted materials in training its generative AI models.
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