Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Science and ICT Bae Gyeong-hoon announced on the 29th that the government will focus on fostering the physical artificial intelligence (AI) sector as a national strategic industry, with the goal of becoming a global leader in the field.

During the National Report on 3 Major Mega-Projects held at the Blue House, Deputy Prime Minister Bae stated, "The next three years are the golden time to become a top-tier leader in physical AI," adding, "The government will designate physical AI as a national strategic industry and lead its development."

Bae emphasized that physical AI is fundamentally different from existing robots.

"While traditional robots were passive tools based on rules guided by humans, physical AI perceives situations, predicts decision-making, and acts like a human," he said. "We are facing a great transformation where industrial sites and daily life are changing due to this autonomy."

He also noted that South Korea possesses the optimal conditions to lead in physical AI.

"We have a strong manufacturing-based industrial infrastructure, world-class AI capabilities, and the world's top two semiconductor companies are in Korea," Bae said, while cautioning, "However, this is not the time to be complacent."

Bae identified data acquisition as the core task for physical AI.

"Generative AI has secured data equivalent to 100,000 years, whereas physical AI has only about 10,000 hours, which is woefully insufficient," he explained. "It could take 100,000 years to bring current physical AI to the level of today's Large Language Models (LLM)."

He particularly pointed out the difficulty of acquiring physical AI data, which requires collecting motion data by applying physical laws to each individual object, and emphasized, "It is important to secure as much field data as possible while simultaneously building virtual simulation environments tailored to specific purposes to generate synthetic data."

Once the data foundation is established, the next step is to build a general-purpose physical AI foundation model based on a 'world model' that understands the real world and predicts actions within three years.

Based on this, the government plans to develop specialized models for various fields to apply in the real world, and promote the localization of the entire physical AI full-stack, including robots, general-purpose physical AI models, world models, and network security.

"We will support demonstration projects in various fields such as agriculture, manufacturing, and safety care, and actively provide backing so that the physical AI platform can become an export industry," Bae stated.

He added, "We will create a sustainable growth strategy for South Korea by increasing the productivity of key industries by 20% through physical AI to create a super-gap, responding to welfare demands through the introduction of robots in homes, revitalizing the local economy, and achieving zero industrial accident fatalities."

(Photo: Yonhap News)