Source: Swiss Institute of Artificial Intelligence
After leaving Korea, for the last a year, I’ve heard frequently if I ever want to go back and help Korean kids to learn AI/Data Science.
I have so far tried to be nice, but on here, let me be brutally honest with them. I don’t think Korea has any chance at all. The government and large corporate drive the cash support, but the investment only goes to a ‘trustworthy’ and ‘safe’ institutions that are populated by software engineers without any mathematical training. They claim that AI is a coding library application on IT services, not creating math-based computational models for customizing learning processes.
I have tried about 7 years until last year, althought since 2022, I have already given up the most parts and been busy with team building with the Euro team. From the 7 years, the painful experience has told me that it is no better than Prfoessor Richard Dawkins’s lifetime fight against religious dogma. I had to leave them to save myself from mental disorder.
Recently, during random googling, I spot above comment from one of the most degenerate Korean communities with full of extreme right wing dogma. I myself consider a right wing in many subjects, but it is difficult for me to read the postings and comments in that community, to say the least.
Anyways, the text can be translated in this way.
What the fxxx is “Fox News”? Puhaha What about “Wolf News”, you fxxxin dushbag?
Such a midget* insignificant internet garbage, Downvote*!
For ‘midget’, the direct translation in that Korean comment (개) is ‘dog’, which is a common Korean prefix to disparage something.
And, the ‘downvote’ (ㅁㅈㅎ) actually means ‘Democritization’, which the extreme right wing community use as an antonym of the industrialization, or economic growth and success.
In short, any Korean with some internet community exposure can immediately understand that the comment is from the degenerate community.
Global ignorance or Korea as a Galapagos
Setting aside the community specific grammar, I want to focus on the fact that Fox News was called insignificant. Not just insignificant. It was treated like a random internet garbage.
Clearly, the Korean commentor must have no knowledge about the Fox News’s international reputation, or at least the domestic reputation in the US. Though the right-wing skewed messages may estrange large portion of viewership, I don’t think anyone in the US will be able to dismiss Fox News the way that ultra right wing Korean community guy’s comment.
Yet, the right wing community, which must consume another country’s right wing media frequently, had such a comment. I had refreshed the page after a few hours, just to confirm that there was any body correcting him. No one mocked his ignorance.
Short-sighted, narrow-minded, ignorant, and driving-out true innovators
I have had a lot, a lot of public outrage whenever I counterattacked fake AI claims from companies and company officials on SNS. I just could not let them fool average people and make profit out of it. It’s not just bad for the fooled people. I tried to stop them because it could undermine the country’s future. Those people attacked by me tried to make me an insignificant ‘midget’ like the way above comment dismisses Fox News. And, the communities followed and consumed their story. They criticized me that I was the one elevating myself to ‘midget’ them.
Well… after 7 years, no one in Korea would argue that those fakes and puppets have hard-carried Korean AI sector to global level.
I remember there were many people like me at the onset of the “Alpha-Go shock” in 2016-2018. I had met a few mathematically well-trained people. They all shared my complaints and wanted to sweep out the engineers and restore the order.
Well.. the reality was harsh. We only knew math and science, but we did not know how to play the game in Korea with media and government.
We were the ones marginalized by them. One by one, we left Korea.
What dissuaded me the most was the disparaging comments like the one for Fox News. The ‘midget’ actually is them, not the Fox News. But in their short-sighted, narrow-minded, and ignorant bubble, Fox News was nobody. To them, I was nobody. I was insiginificant. I was fake. I was just a pretender. It was a fight that I was destined to lose.
In fact, the only way to fix that was to pay $$$ to Korean corporate media to decorate myself. I had to become a celeb to persuade them, to be influential, and to change the Korea’s social dynamics. Why do I have to pay $$$ to save only a handful of intellectual people, while I already work 24/7 to create eductional contents? How much committment should I have made? Why do I fight this long end-game alone?
At least, had the government’s VC funding given to people like us, had the public tax money been used correctly, like it has been done so in China, I would have not left Korea. Given what I have done at Swiss Institute of Artificial Intelligence, I am sure many of us would have been able to claim that Korea could be a dark-horse in the global AI competition.
But then, why should WE have to pay the price? We only wanted to correct it. Shouldn’t the government pay the price? Shouldn’t the country pay the price? Shouldn’t the companies pay the price? Why on earth do WE have to pay the correction price, while we can have no benefit whatsoever?
When time comes, I am going to officially document what exactly has happened in Korea so that no other countries make the same mistake. For people leading one’s country, please be aware that your single ignorant choice wipes out the entire country’s future and drives out all intellectuals.
You really have to be careful in choosing your lifetime fight, but you sure the hell have to choose where to fight a lot more carefully.
Source: Shutterstock
A University, a beacon of intelligence
What makes the situation even worse is that they do not listen, like the religiously brain-washed people in Professor Richard Dawkins’s episode.
Professor Richard Dawkins had built a university, New College, in London with a few intelletual people holding the same intelligence torches. They fought, but they also had to confront with loads of criticism from all kinds of religious parties. They eventually sold the university to the owner of Northeastern University in Boston.
My story isn’t that different, just with a little smaller scale. I had built a grad school in Swiss, in the name of Swiss Institute of Artificial Intelligence, together with my European buddies. After initial set up, the buddies took over my torch from 2022, and eventually we handed over the ownership to the Gordon.
I do not know the detailed sale terms of the Richard Dawkins’s New College. Likewise, we cannot really detail out the sale terms of Swiss Institute of Artificial Intelligence, but I can say that all of us have been benefited by the deal. We can continue working on our research without concerning financials anymore. We in fact have enough funding to test our computational financial models in the frame of hedge funds. The Gordon can claim the ownership on what we have built and what we will build in return.
I now feel that I have chosen the right fight at the right place.
3rd AI Stack from Europe, from Swiss
- Build the Neutral Spine of AI: Why Europe Must Stand Up Its Own Stack
- Making the case for a third AI technology stack
We have agreed to the Gordon family to claim the ownership of the school on one condition.
Let us build our own AI stack, not like the commercial ones from US Big Techs that are for software engineers. We HATE them contaiminating this mathematical achievements. By now, you should be able to understand how much I HATE Korean devs, especially the ones claiming AI expertise just with blind copy of code libraries.
We would like to build computational frameworks for scientific users only. With focus on minimizing computational cost, we would like to make the world to hire scientists and ignore engineers from this league, if they do not like to rely on expensive data centers and electricity bills. We just use more efficient brains and save large amount of energy, like any developed world does.
The targets that we would like to rule out may marginalize us, like it was in Korea, but I do believe the global science community will not play the same music as K-pop.