People are saying its because of south korea is pro capitalism but in reality its because majority of east Asians loves ai. Like chinese, koreans, Vietnamese and japanese are using ai more and more. Like go to any big convention or historical places and there are countless ai pictures.
Also for chinese and korean internet user they love shaming people who dont use ai. To them people who dont use ai are like the 19th century Confucius scholars who rejected western technology that led to therr country downfall.
I teach Vietnamese students and I know plenty of high school and university students who hate AI because they view it as a threat to their future job prospects. It is a pretty common sentiment here actually.
Given that youth unemployment is also high in China with a large "laying flat" movement, it wouldn't surprise me if there's similar concerns among their young population there as well even if broader society may be more pro-AI.
Also, given how much China is investing in AI and since we know they do a lot to censor and shape internet discourse, it wouldn't surprise me if anti-AI sentiment is tampered down there. Vietnam does a similar thing with shaping online discourse to fit particular narratives that it views as being in its government's and corporations' best interests.
They literally give you death threats if you say anything against AI in China, not the government, the people. They won't do that in person but on internet, chinese netizens can be unhinged. My chinese friend actually said that the firewall also protects westerners from chinese netizens.
No such thing. That's just a tiny minority of people who got Western news attention because people love doomscrolling. That's just one of the many terms you hear on Reddit that never gets used in the real world like "Chinamaxxing" or other nonsense.
Chinesemaxxing* is just a meme. Mostly just means smoking cigarettes and drinking beer outside, gambling, other stereotypical things people imagine old Chinese guys sitting on the sidewalk might do. You’ll hear “I’m at a very Chinese point in my life” a lot.
Ask them what they think about the internet, computers/smartphones, scoots/motorbikes that everyone rides in Vietnam, agricultural innovations/tech, etc. All those definitely displaced some jobs.
Korea's adoption of AI seems to me less like forward-thinking policy and more like adoption of the latest fad, similar to how Koreans line up for American fast-food restaurants like Five Guys or In-n-Out or she'll out big bucks for Moncler coats.
There's a certain element of fetishism on the part of Koreans when it comes to hot businesses whether it be fast food chains or clothing brands, and AI seems to play right into that.
They hold a monopoly over one of the biggest bottlenecks in the AI buildout (memory) and are currently in a nationwide push to develop a domestic model. They’re also one of the most advanced manufacturing ecosystems in the world and one of the leaders in global robotics, both of which benefit immensely as AI is deeply embedded.
Calling the national interest in AI a “fad” because Koreans lined up for Five Guys is just very very low resolution.
I just want to say that its not just Korea for American fast food. Five Guys in Melbourne is always packed despite how expensive it is just for fast food. When a starbucks first opened in West Australia, it saw massive queues the entire day for several months. I think the only one which didnt attract a massive crowd was Taco Bell.
But it isn't for a good reason. They are not using AI in a "sustainable" or healthy way, but going full on AI to improve and change their appearance in pics to share in social media, cheat on work and studies where they should try to learn, or just making "art" in a easy way like "look, I made this". Because in Asia, being they best, looking they best, is very important
I remember not long ago it would go viral when some girls would have their AI filter off and show a completely different person, like a 50yo woman trying to go as a 20yo model
It's too fucked up there, notbing to admire in lots of cases
you know what china and south korea have done to protect their citizens from ai? instituted regulations that allow users to benefit from ai, protects their data with additional layers, and restricts what children have access to. allowing users to benefit from ai and restricting the harm it causes makes both those countries better than the united states and it's rape and pillage every village model of ai usage.
Lol.
As korean who also worked in china for 2 years thats all bullshit. Its like korean and chinese anti porn laws. It exist but every korean and chinese people will still see porn.
These kind of laws only exist to make the government look righteous in reality they dont give a shit if the civilains are being hurt. They will only act when they are too much pressured by the people and right now most civilians support ai so thats never going to happen.
Im sorry but so many westerner glaze east asian country or think east asian countries are hell.
In reality all east asian countries are the same. Youth are being overworked while ai is stealing our jobs with the support from the majority. Like its not hell but its slowly becoming more diffrent than the west
South Korea & China are arguably the countries that’s seen the most change in the past 70 years.
They went from being one of the poorest to one of the richest countries, all within one person’s life time.
That meant not really clinging onto traditions too hard, and being open for change. You really see it everywhere, from food, where Koreans for example love to incorporate western/foreign things into their traditional food (compare that to Italy) and to AI, where it’s seen as just another essential tool to master like smartphones or Internet.
Their culture is perfectly set up to be accepting of new technologies. Their laws, which don’t do shit tbh, don’t really play into people buying into it.
Source: Korean-Canadian who’s worked in AI since the 2010s
Yep. My grandma was born in 1940 in Seoul and immigrated to the US in 1965, Korea went from poorer than sub-saharan Africa to one of the world's biggest economies in that time.
A lot of people think that Korean society is fad-based, and that's a fair criticism for some things, but they're also highly adaptable and not as resistant to change as westerners.
Or… it’s because most of the South Korean economy is based on being hardware suppliers for the AI companies. They need widespread adoption of this technology or the KOSPI implodes.
Because these countries have guardrails that promote it as a social good as opposed to a maniacal outlet for little men hoping to become tyrants.
Korea is literally trying to push for a chip windfall fund from the AI boom. Samsung and SK Hynix already paid out record bonuses. Samsung opened up a near $3.5b fund for purchasers of electronics to receive 20-30% refunds in gift vouchers. Korea also has insane wealth and inheritance tax — Samsung family just paid roughly $8bn due to this.
China reigned in on its billionaire class over the last 10 years. The government is intent on keeping on the billionaire class in check.
Context here is important. These countries treat it like a public/common good, not an egomaniacal outlet for personal power and wealth.
I wonder if the attitude is true in the diaspora. Nearly every other East Asian American I know, including among my own extended family, really likes AI and uses it often.
Free AI with no token limits is misleading to the point of being a lie here.
They've announced adding AI tools/assistants to government services, run on about 512 B200 chips. That's ~30 million $ of gpus.
That's about 60 cents of GPU per korean. so it wouldn't even come close to matching a cheap AI subscription, let alone a crazy claim such as "no limits".
As for the idea itself, sounds great to me. The government is in a much better position to provide optimized AI tools to interface with government systems, rather than having to rely on people figuring it out themselves.
So who is paying for the energy usage? And with no cost being passed down to the people actually using the tokens, what prevents a small number of people from using the datacenter's capacity?
~~Samsung and Hyundai~~ Essentially the major chaebol families like the ones that control Samsung, Hyundai, SK, and LG. The country is mostly just ~~these two companies~~ a few families.
They are probably some compute constraints that will catch this well before this becomes a major issue. In the meantime they are lowering the barrier to build out new features, products, and companies. There was a new open source model just released that rivals Anthropic's best model from back in January. SK Hynx is shooting up. It is probably a good investment for them, time will tell if anything meaningful comes out of it.
Jesus, would it kill you to at least glance the article before answering incorrectly with such confidence?
Neither Samsung nor Hyundai are directly involved. They named 3 consortiums to provide the services, one by Kakao, and two others by KT and SK (the two largest telecomm companies).
I forgot LG and didn't realize SK was their own Chaebol. These 4 families control over 40% of the entire country's GDP. My answer was a bit tongue in cheek, but not far off from the truth. The rest of the chaebols control an additional 40% of the country's GDP. Chaebol leaders have even been known to get out of jail sentences and receive pardons.
These models can be incredibly energy efficient. They aren't getting token-heavy models like Claude's Fable freely distributed.
Claude Haiku 4.5 (their lightweight model) uses 100 joules of energy per output. That's the same amount of electricity your microwave uses in one tenth of one second. Completely doable for a country to offer this to their citizens.
It doesn't take them 12 years to build a nuclear reactor like it does in the US, as they don't over regulate and give NIMBYs a say in things, so energy isn't really much of a concern for them
When everyone can use it freely, chances are very high that a lot of interesting stuff comes out of that. Limiting access to knowledge or tools has never been a smart idea in the history of humans. The moment huge groups got access to common knowledge, we had movements that catapulted humanity forward. So the energy costs can probably be seen simply as investment like in schools and universities.
America is taking stakes in AI and tech companies instead and based on the robber barron theory of Capitalism currently being practiced by the government for the billionaires, there's no chance it'll be free for Americans. It might be mandatory we have a subscription though.
Bold of you to assume it’ll just be a flat subscription fee. It’ll be tiered free tier gives you AI that tries to sell you microtransactions, premium tier lets your AI argue with your landlord's AI and the enterprise tier actually gives you a correct answer once in a while.
Are you actually following the industry or are you basing your statment based on vibes? AI has become incredibly accessible thanks to open weight Chinese models but OpenAIs 5.6 Luna,Metas new model are also cheap and pretty good. SOTA models are expensive but 90% of the users won't need them, they are useful for research or problems which mid tier models can't handle.
You're missing the point. It’s not about token cost it’s about access and control. South Korea treated access to LLMs as a public utility like water or electricity while the US market model guarantees that user data, feature access and quality outputs remain gated behind corporate paywalls.
Setting the vibes aside, I’m less concerned about OpenAI v Anthropic or whatever Chinese model drops an upgrade this week.
I’m very concerned about:
how those models are applied to businesses and public institutions,
the evolution of business models WRT to both, especially our institutions, and
the access to those businesses and institutions in the age of AI
One case in point: Objection.ai started as a business which would accept pseudo-legal complaints filed against journalists by subjects who felt as though the journalist was reporting with ~~malice~~ incorrect facts.
Objection.ai has just rebranded as ThePrimary.com, which seems to carry over some of the public sourcing and scoring mechanisms and less of the legalistic ones.
Doesn’t mean backers like Balaji Stevenson and Peter Theil, proponents of “network states” and parallel institutuons, won’t keep trying to build these things.
Yeah, because the US government no longer cares about the basic well-being of the people, just enriching those in power.
While places like S. Korea actually want to help their people succeed, as they care about what's important for long term success as a nation. Whereas those in power here don't give a hoot about the long term, not their problem...
Traitorous aholes are pushing the whole world to hate us, while they snatch more wealth for private islands, super yachts, and underground bunkers, while creating entire nations who'd want to destroy us... Strategic dealmaking, I think not...
Bold move comparing us to South Korea. Their idea of national well being is a 52-hour work week, a hype competitive rat race that makes Wall Street look like a daycare, and a birth rate so low the nation is effectively performing a speedrun on demographic collapse. But hey free tokens.
Yeah, you're right about those. I was more lamenting the fact that the US is taking away existing social support programs, and definitely not adding new ones to help people like that one.
And it's nice to hear at least some countries trying to help their people in some way in this day and age... It just feels like the US is heading backwards, when we could do so much good, if there was the will in those with power...
You'll also need a face scan that is checked with the government to use it, just like the direction browsing the internet and using operating systems are going.
I suggest reading the summary /r/moderatepolitics of the Meta settlement. Part of the settlement is that everyone on the platform will soon be required to have their faces scanned. Accounts that refuse will have restrictions like being able to only access it for 2 hours a day and banned from accessing it from midnight to 6 am. Feeds will be filtered from even lawful content such as people talking about their mental health or fitness goals, and they will be vetted by content morality auditors. There are a ton of other wtf requirements outlined in the summary.
The goal if you read the settlement is to enforce this in a way that this becomes a requirement for every website.
As if SK did not have enough problems, now they are going to have a whole bunch of people falling into AI psychosis, or at best, the population practicing cognitive surrender to a clanker and unlearning how to think for themselves.
Honestly, I think that both ends of this are problematic. The challenge will be to land somewhere in the middle where you understand it, utilize it for personal growth but without relying on it.
Absolutely. I'm a software developer, so it has hit my industry hard. AI can produce code faster than a human can and the game has shifted to the higher-level mental work of planning, designing, and reviewing. Even then, subagents can offload some of that work with a human for final review. The common issues we've seen is either lazy devs or folks getting rusty with syntax, both of which can be solved pretty easily.
Same boat and totally agree. One issue I keep having is that it’s hard to find reasonable discourse about how other people are implementing, what lessons they are learning etc. It’s either “AI will take your job in 6 months” hype nonsense, or the whole thread just has their heads firmly in the sand about it and downvoting any comment that dares to mention how useful it can be. The latter is much more common on reddit these days it seems.
About the AI will take your job part. The more I see the potential of what AI can and can not do, the more I think that the biggest problem it will cause to the IT job sector will not be that it will replace all developers but that it will replace all junior developers while barely impacting the need for senior but then where will the seniors come from when there are no junior developers getting trained?
The floor just rises and we need to have our education curriculum embrace the shifted paradigm of development and teach the new tooling intentionally. In terms of expectations and responsibilities, entry level positions will be somewhere between where they were previously and a senior.
The issue is less reliance and more about accountability it’s why ai is harmful to society. It can’t be allowed to make decisions cause who do you punish if it kills someone or pushes people to suicide (it’s already done these things). The other aspect is that it’s a pattern machine and it can have errors it’s why you can’t really practice some things alone cause you’ll only feed your mistakes and missteps and ai already does that cause of its sycophantic behavior. You can’t have it have any biases towards the user cause otherwise it will slowly taint the knowledge basis
The gap is going to be between individuals who use AI to critically solve problems, and those that blindly accept the response and are too lazy to dive deeper.
I mean, yeah if it would only work 9/10 correctly and rely on a business model which is completely unsustainable at the moment, I would say: Don‘t rely on your phone or electricity.
When we reach a point where it‘s as reliable than our current electricity grid and phone network, we can talk about reversing this advice but as of right now, I think it‘s better to just use but not trust AI.
Those who rely on AI too much will be deficient in complex and critical thinking and being able to rely on one’s self. Bulk foundational knowledge is number two.
how does ai increase critical/cognitive thinking? the reliance on causes the opposite effect. offloading cognitive tasks and decisions onto claude. ai offers answers, not probing our minds, asking us deeper questions.
the other commenter was spot on, that skill gaps will show in niche markets/industries that are more complex and skilled by their nature.
bulk foundational knowledge are libraries and humans who have honed skills and made mistakes to hone those skills. ai scrapes libraries.
I’m saying AI will reduce those two areas. Those that don’t rely on it so much will have a greater capacity and ability for critical and complex thinking. Having bulk foundational knowledge, rather than just getting pieces here and there from AI, lets someone be far more holistic and cerebral about any particular topic or field.
I edited the original comment to make that clearer.
Depends on the domain it's being used in. Broadly, though, harness management and shifting to more systems-oriented approaches and designing testable constraints to guide agentic workflows.
Folks that reject actually learning AI and treat them as simple chatbots are going to be late to learning how to use them effectively, which will work to their detriment especially in highly technical fields where its use is becoming a standard.
> are going to be late to learning how to use them effectively
I'd maybe believe this if "how to use AI" didn't change as fast as the models themselves. Without going too much into my own career, I'm in laboratory automation and informatics, developing tools and scripts to link parts of the lab together. I'm aware of, though not proficient in, everything you're describing. I haven't bothered trying to become proficient because "best practices" are always changing: what was good six months ago doesn't apply today, and what was good a year ago is alien to today's workflows. What I have tried has been hilariously useless (full agentic workflows are excellent for removing your mental model of how the code works, and turning your code base into spaghetti that might technically work but is impossibly brittle), so I'm happy staying as an observer for now.
So, the average person needs to learn it? It's like the folks saying three years ago they were "prompt engineers." Those skills (mostly knowing the quirks of a given model) are still slightly useful today, but it's a whole different game now. So if you learn the ecosystem around harness management today, who's to say that'll still be useful in a year's time?
And on top of that, the "average person" will never need to know anything about "harness management," agentic workflows, etc. It might be useful in the software dev world, but not really outside in the "real" world.
I think you're getting at a thing much broader than AI. I see that dynamic as a general effect of emergent technologies that change how one interfaces with their work. There's a burst of different, iterative approaches until a best practice settles and the industry coalesces around it.
I don't think the "average person" necessarily needs to learn that much about harnesses, subagents, workflow topology, etc. When I'm talking about skill gaps, I'm specifically talking about intra-industry or even intra-role gaps, mostly focusing on white collar industries.
Even in non-technical fields it is creeping in. I'm learning as much as I can now to understand how it works beyond being a "simple chatbot". I'm not interested in being left behind or losing my job because of refusal to adapt.
>Folks that reject actually learning AI and treat them as simple chatbots are going to be late to learning how to use them effectively, which will work to their detriment
I see this "you'll be left behind" idea everywhere, and it's absurd.
I’ll rarely use AI and try to not use it as much as possible. The people who do use it in my office and family…are not great thinkers I’d say. I’ve overheard people using it to give responses to texts to friends. I think that might be a bit too much. And it doesn’t even seem to do a lot of these tasks well.
> I’ve overheard people using it to give responses to texts to friends.
This is really sad. Interacting with friends is one of the best parts of human life and experience. To start taking your heart & soul out of that is insulting.
When I’m very convinced a stock is going to do well, I’ll ask AI for a bear case or vice versa. I think it’s great at finding reasons a stock isn’t as good as I thought. It’ll provide links to the articles it’s citing which I make sure to check are real since it’s effecting my trading decisions. I’ll also use it for photographer or videographer to made mask something out but that existed before and was just made a little bit better and little faster with AI.
That's definitely more attributable to increased access to video media through streaming and short-form video content consuming a large part of the attention economy. People are simply reading less due to the media market we've cultivated, not because of computers themselves. I read even more now with the accessibility of a good e-reader.
I think it'll be some form of U-shaped or V-shaped distribution.
Dumb people will use AI in dumb and counterproductive (to their own social and or cognitive development) ways. Other people, who aren't dumb, but are simply unlucky enough to be in situations where access to good generative AI isn't available, isn't relevant, or is actively harmful, will also be shafted.
The largest chunk of the population will use it intermediately, in some situations but not others, following their own life experiences, and trial and error, and assessing how much it hurts or helps to use it in different domains. Results will vary and some people will have a better or worse time of it depending on how accurate their own assessments are of the long term pros / cons of AI use for the particular set of tasks they use it for. But generally it won't change their life prospects too much one way or the other
The smartest (or just the luckiest) in the population will be able to use AI to compliment their natural and acquired skills in a way that greatly increases their ability to find success in the world, in whatever ways they may define that.
The question is what will the proportions of these three rough tiers be and what will influence who falls in which tier. That will largely depend on how the capabilities, costs, and knowledge about the inner workings of these systems evolve over the next several years or longer.
The last part is the most important. Different technologies have certainly had widely different benefit/cost profiles depending on where on the socioeconomic totem pole you are, especially when they're new. There's a whole sci-fi genre based on extrapolating this pattern into the future.
Yes, you are. You assume you know what is best for everyone and that they are beneath you.
You saying there is very little threat with such high confidence over something that is extremely uncertain is pretty hilarious. It’s exactly what we mean when we say people’s ability to critically think on their own is jeopardy. Although, in your case that may have been a preexisting condition.
You’ve closed yourself off from any dissent or challenge to your worldview. Humble yourself. You are a tenth as clever as you think you are.
If you're a SWE I'm surprised you think AI makes you think less/cause brain rot.. my tasks have become larger and more complicated, it wouldn't have been feasible to do this amount of work in a short period of time. It does remove the need to think through the boring things like bugs but I think a bulk of the work still requires a lot of thought.
I love the AI. It's made me more productive and also removed the need for me to deal with the issues that made me want to quit my job stuck on problems nobody could help me with.
The AI use case you're most worried about akin to spelling 8008135 on a graphing calculator.
LLMs are not conversational tools. They are business tools and mass early adoption is very smart. Kids will need to learn how to use them to compete.
I work for a fairly prestigious University as a software engineer and every single one of my colleagues is using it heavily on daily basis. I have more time to think than I ever have in my career. AI does not remove thinking. It removes pointless toil.
In Korea there isn’t even a lot of thinking for yourself to begin with. It’s memorizing facts for grades, not critical thinking, and doing what your manager says to obey and meet deadlines as quick as possible. It makes sense AI got embraced.
Looks like South Korea is about to experience a boom in AI-generated porn... and sex chats.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.
People in America often resist AI because they’re afraid of losing valuable, well-paying jobs. In many other countries, people may embrace AI more readily because they have less to lose and more to gain.
I don’t think this is the only reason Americans often resist Ai. Many Americans see the harm that comes with Ai infrastructure, big one is the resources it is draining for a data center. A lot of energy and water are consumed.
For Koreans to have free Ai that’s fine but you get them hooked and dependent on it by making it accessible to anyone for free of the cost to there everyday lives and they will start to over look these of concerns the America is now faced with.
The only thing I see going for the states in general is just making models more power efficient like what China has been doing with their recent rounds of Ai models. Instead of expanding they should be focused on making their models efficient and not more costly.
That’s part of the equation, but there’s definitely more of a societal aspect as well. I’m an American living in Korea atm. Commercials in Korea are regularly chock filled with AI to the brim. No one bats an eye. Entire ads are made of AI from start to finish in movie theaters. Definitely a culture shock.
For Korean and chinese netizens the anti ai people are the same neo confuicious scholars in the 19th century that refused to innovate.
They screamed at how injustice there trade with the west were while refusing to adopt technology. They just vented at how unfair it was as the west destroyed us. And by the end the country was left behind in the dust as the same scholars could only think about the good old days while there country became irrelevant.
Now I dont know if ai is realy gonna change society or its just another bubble but this is how many chinese and koreans thinks like.
Consumers have been anchored to think ai is like Google search and should be free or cost less than nothing to use. Giving away tokens like this will only make it harder to charge consumers the true cost. Giving these tokens away is basically a way to artificially create demand and subsidize growth. AI companies still cannot find a profitable business model but they still push forward, I just wonder how much longer this delusion can last.
Their birth rate is among the lowest (if not the lowest) in the world. They need a productivity boost somehow to keep up with their economic growth if they don't want to disappear.
Also their economy is quite peculiar. It's a sort of social capitalism managed by a government and an oligopoly of companies (Samsung, Hyundai, LG, etc.).
People who say it's the biggest success story of capitalism don't want to see the real effects: among the highest suicide rate and lowest birth rate in the world, high sleep deprivation, burnout and overwork.
No, they DO know the real effect is just they don't care even if they affect them because in they mind suicide is better than Cuba or china and a "small price they are willing to pay".
At the foundational level, every Korean will benefit from AI capability - education, innovation, productivity...Koreans are already highly educated and learning focused.
Free access will make it uneconomical for US AI providers (e.g., OpenAI, Anthropic...) to invest in differentiating for Korean market. This will give room for Korean AI ventures to invest and find market for specialized AI offering.
Most critically, Korea will be able to retain and grow AI competitiveness that will be critical to continuous prosperity. K-AI.
Reasonable_Fold6492 | 13 hours ago
People are saying its because of south korea is pro capitalism but in reality its because majority of east Asians loves ai. Like chinese, koreans, Vietnamese and japanese are using ai more and more. Like go to any big convention or historical places and there are countless ai pictures.
Also for chinese and korean internet user they love shaming people who dont use ai. To them people who dont use ai are like the 19th century Confucius scholars who rejected western technology that led to therr country downfall.
bacharama | 13 hours ago
I teach Vietnamese students and I know plenty of high school and university students who hate AI because they view it as a threat to their future job prospects. It is a pretty common sentiment here actually.
Given that youth unemployment is also high in China with a large "laying flat" movement, it wouldn't surprise me if there's similar concerns among their young population there as well even if broader society may be more pro-AI.
Also, given how much China is investing in AI and since we know they do a lot to censor and shape internet discourse, it wouldn't surprise me if anti-AI sentiment is tampered down there. Vietnam does a similar thing with shaping online discourse to fit particular narratives that it views as being in its government's and corporations' best interests.
kenjikazama777 | 10 hours ago
They literally give you death threats if you say anything against AI in China, not the government, the people. They won't do that in person but on internet, chinese netizens can be unhinged. My chinese friend actually said that the firewall also protects westerners from chinese netizens.
YouVe_BeEn_OofEd | 7 hours ago
westerners would be unable to comprehend the sheer absurdity of chinese shitposts
xmakeafistx | 12 hours ago
https://archive.is/ICSfv
I’m not sure about youth specifically but here it indicates that China is feeling pretty good about AI
Hot-Train7201 | 12 hours ago
> large "laying flat" movement
No such thing. That's just a tiny minority of people who got Western news attention because people love doomscrolling. That's just one of the many terms you hear on Reddit that never gets used in the real world like "Chinamaxxing" or other nonsense.
easythrees | 10 hours ago
Chinamaxxing?
egg_idk | 10 hours ago
Chinesemaxxing* is just a meme. Mostly just means smoking cigarettes and drinking beer outside, gambling, other stereotypical things people imagine old Chinese guys sitting on the sidewalk might do. You’ll hear “I’m at a very Chinese point in my life” a lot.
Wild_Space | 10 hours ago
Kids love being counter-culture. Them hating AI is not proof that the larger culture doesn't love AI.
Jotun_tv | 4 hours ago
You should teach them that the tool (AI) isn’t what they should be mad at.
InclinationCompass | 9 hours ago
Ask them what they think about the internet, computers/smartphones, scoots/motorbikes that everyone rides in Vietnam, agricultural innovations/tech, etc. All those definitely displaced some jobs.
qxrt | 11 hours ago
Korea's adoption of AI seems to me less like forward-thinking policy and more like adoption of the latest fad, similar to how Koreans line up for American fast-food restaurants like Five Guys or In-n-Out or she'll out big bucks for Moncler coats.
There's a certain element of fetishism on the part of Koreans when it comes to hot businesses whether it be fast food chains or clothing brands, and AI seems to play right into that.
Dickasaurus_Rex_ | 8 hours ago
They hold a monopoly over one of the biggest bottlenecks in the AI buildout (memory) and are currently in a nationwide push to develop a domestic model. They’re also one of the most advanced manufacturing ecosystems in the world and one of the leaders in global robotics, both of which benefit immensely as AI is deeply embedded.
Calling the national interest in AI a “fad” because Koreans lined up for Five Guys is just very very low resolution.
wheatlander | 4 hours ago
I agree, I think the original comment isn't going to age well lol. This kind of stuff is said every time a new, disruptive technology is taking over.
Personally, I thought text messaging and cameras on phones was basically pointless and fade away. I was just a little bit wrong lol.
Could say the same thing about electric cars, the internet, television, etc..
-WARPING- | 58 minutes ago
I just want to say that its not just Korea for American fast food. Five Guys in Melbourne is always packed despite how expensive it is just for fast food. When a starbucks first opened in West Australia, it saw massive queues the entire day for several months. I think the only one which didnt attract a massive crowd was Taco Bell.
onechroma | 9 hours ago
But it isn't for a good reason. They are not using AI in a "sustainable" or healthy way, but going full on AI to improve and change their appearance in pics to share in social media, cheat on work and studies where they should try to learn, or just making "art" in a easy way like "look, I made this". Because in Asia, being they best, looking they best, is very important
I remember not long ago it would go viral when some girls would have their AI filter off and show a completely different person, like a 50yo woman trying to go as a 20yo model
It's too fucked up there, notbing to admire in lots of cases
chumpandchive | 13 hours ago
you know what china and south korea have done to protect their citizens from ai? instituted regulations that allow users to benefit from ai, protects their data with additional layers, and restricts what children have access to. allowing users to benefit from ai and restricting the harm it causes makes both those countries better than the united states and it's rape and pillage every village model of ai usage.
Reasonable_Fold6492 | 13 hours ago
Lol. As korean who also worked in china for 2 years thats all bullshit. Its like korean and chinese anti porn laws. It exist but every korean and chinese people will still see porn.
These kind of laws only exist to make the government look righteous in reality they dont give a shit if the civilains are being hurt. They will only act when they are too much pressured by the people and right now most civilians support ai so thats never going to happen.
Im sorry but so many westerner glaze east asian country or think east asian countries are hell.
In reality all east asian countries are the same. Youth are being overworked while ai is stealing our jobs with the support from the majority. Like its not hell but its slowly becoming more diffrent than the west
PeruvianHeadshrinker | 12 hours ago
I don't know it actually sounds pretty similar to the West.
It seems that any concentrated power anywhere in the world regardless of culture will Fuck over those without power.
Swinight22 | 12 hours ago
That’s just flat out wrong.
South Korea & China are arguably the countries that’s seen the most change in the past 70 years.
They went from being one of the poorest to one of the richest countries, all within one person’s life time.
That meant not really clinging onto traditions too hard, and being open for change. You really see it everywhere, from food, where Koreans for example love to incorporate western/foreign things into their traditional food (compare that to Italy) and to AI, where it’s seen as just another essential tool to master like smartphones or Internet.
Their culture is perfectly set up to be accepting of new technologies. Their laws, which don’t do shit tbh, don’t really play into people buying into it.
Source: Korean-Canadian who’s worked in AI since the 2010s
Frequent_Phone6396 | 4 hours ago
Yep. My grandma was born in 1940 in Seoul and immigrated to the US in 1965, Korea went from poorer than sub-saharan Africa to one of the world's biggest economies in that time.
A lot of people think that Korean society is fad-based, and that's a fair criticism for some things, but they're also highly adaptable and not as resistant to change as westerners.
OuchieMuhBussy | 8 hours ago
Or… it’s because most of the South Korean economy is based on being hardware suppliers for the AI companies. They need widespread adoption of this technology or the KOSPI implodes.
BenjaminHamnett | 6 hours ago
Socrates thought the written word would be our downfall 😂
Luckily his students didn’t listen
Octose | 4 hours ago
Because these countries have guardrails that promote it as a social good as opposed to a maniacal outlet for little men hoping to become tyrants.
Korea is literally trying to push for a chip windfall fund from the AI boom. Samsung and SK Hynix already paid out record bonuses. Samsung opened up a near $3.5b fund for purchasers of electronics to receive 20-30% refunds in gift vouchers. Korea also has insane wealth and inheritance tax — Samsung family just paid roughly $8bn due to this.
China reigned in on its billionaire class over the last 10 years. The government is intent on keeping on the billionaire class in check.
Context here is important. These countries treat it like a public/common good, not an egomaniacal outlet for personal power and wealth.
Used-Client-9334 | 3 hours ago
Overly simplistic.
Soonhun | 12 hours ago
I wonder if the attitude is true in the diaspora. Nearly every other East Asian American I know, including among my own extended family, really likes AI and uses it often.
Dangerous-Sport-2347 | 11 hours ago
Free AI with no token limits is misleading to the point of being a lie here.
They've announced adding AI tools/assistants to government services, run on about 512 B200 chips. That's ~30 million $ of gpus.
That's about 60 cents of GPU per korean. so it wouldn't even come close to matching a cheap AI subscription, let alone a crazy claim such as "no limits".
As for the idea itself, sounds great to me. The government is in a much better position to provide optimized AI tools to interface with government systems, rather than having to rely on people figuring it out themselves.
ungoogleable | 9 hours ago
> Residents will be able to use them to book doctor appointments, search for apartments, and get tax guidance.
Sounds like the same virtual assistant every company is trying to add to their website.
Willinton06 | 5 hours ago
Which means we go from 1000 versions of this for every doctor, apartment complex and tax agency to 1, which is pretty efficient
Major_Shlongage | 13 hours ago
So who is paying for the energy usage? And with no cost being passed down to the people actually using the tokens, what prevents a small number of people from using the datacenter's capacity?
Affectionate-Panic-1 | 13 hours ago
Guessing it's lightweight models or something. Doubt they'll provide access to models requiring frontier level compute to everyone for free.
Previous_Cod_1356 | 13 hours ago
Doesn't mobile Chrome ship with an edge model these days?
justin107d | 13 hours ago
~~Samsung and Hyundai~~ Essentially the major chaebol families like the ones that control Samsung, Hyundai, SK, and LG. The country is mostly just ~~these two companies~~ a few families.
They are probably some compute constraints that will catch this well before this becomes a major issue. In the meantime they are lowering the barrier to build out new features, products, and companies. There was a new open source model just released that rivals Anthropic's best model from back in January. SK Hynx is shooting up. It is probably a good investment for them, time will tell if anything meaningful comes out of it.
Nessie_of_the_Loch | 11 hours ago
Jesus, would it kill you to at least glance the article before answering incorrectly with such confidence?
Neither Samsung nor Hyundai are directly involved. They named 3 consortiums to provide the services, one by Kakao, and two others by KT and SK (the two largest telecomm companies).
The actual cost will be borne by the government.
justin107d | 11 hours ago
I forgot LG and didn't realize SK was their own Chaebol. These 4 families control over 40% of the entire country's GDP. My answer was a bit tongue in cheek, but not far off from the truth. The rest of the chaebols control an additional 40% of the country's GDP. Chaebol leaders have even been known to get out of jail sentences and receive pardons.
liuqiu_rangers | 2 hours ago
But still better than America which never punishes any major business leader to any extent
TheDadThatGrills | 13 hours ago
These models can be incredibly energy efficient. They aren't getting token-heavy models like Claude's Fable freely distributed.
Claude Haiku 4.5 (their lightweight model) uses 100 joules of energy per output. That's the same amount of electricity your microwave uses in one tenth of one second. Completely doable for a country to offer this to their citizens.
EmptyCash5704 | 13 hours ago
US. They’ll do an intervention if tokens run low. 🤣🤣
jnordwick | 13 hours ago
No Blood for Tokens!
SweatyRussian | 12 hours ago
It's supposed to be an investment to get training data from the whole country.
Joltizer | 13 hours ago
It doesn't take them 12 years to build a nuclear reactor like it does in the US, as they don't over regulate and give NIMBYs a say in things, so energy isn't really much of a concern for them
cragcat8 | 12 hours ago
But the current gov is opposing expanding nuclear power plants, that was one of the major points during the election.
Joltizer | 11 hours ago
Well then energy will become a major problem for them
toolkitxx | 11 hours ago
When everyone can use it freely, chances are very high that a lot of interesting stuff comes out of that. Limiting access to knowledge or tools has never been a smart idea in the history of humans. The moment huge groups got access to common knowledge, we had movements that catapulted humanity forward. So the energy costs can probably be seen simply as investment like in schools and universities.
ThePensiveE | 13 hours ago
America is taking stakes in AI and tech companies instead and based on the robber barron theory of Capitalism currently being practiced by the government for the billionaires, there's no chance it'll be free for Americans. It might be mandatory we have a subscription though.
Straight-Ad6926 | 13 hours ago
Bold of you to assume it’ll just be a flat subscription fee. It’ll be tiered free tier gives you AI that tries to sell you microtransactions, premium tier lets your AI argue with your landlord's AI and the enterprise tier actually gives you a correct answer once in a while.
Affectionate_Bee6434 | 10 hours ago
Are you actually following the industry or are you basing your statment based on vibes? AI has become incredibly accessible thanks to open weight Chinese models but OpenAIs 5.6 Luna,Metas new model are also cheap and pretty good. SOTA models are expensive but 90% of the users won't need them, they are useful for research or problems which mid tier models can't handle.
Straight-Ad6926 | 9 hours ago
You're missing the point. It’s not about token cost it’s about access and control. South Korea treated access to LLMs as a public utility like water or electricity while the US market model guarantees that user data, feature access and quality outputs remain gated behind corporate paywalls.
mcarvin | 9 hours ago
Setting the vibes aside, I’m less concerned about OpenAI v Anthropic or whatever Chinese model drops an upgrade this week.
I’m very concerned about:
One case in point: Objection.ai started as a business which would accept pseudo-legal complaints filed against journalists by subjects who felt as though the journalist was reporting with ~~malice~~ incorrect facts.
https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/15/can-ai-judge-journalism-a-thiel-backed-startup-says-yes-even-if-it-risks-chilling-whistleblowers/
https://www.salon.com/2026/04/23/thiel-backed-ai-project-to-block-bad-press-looks-like-a-bust/
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/peter-thiel-tribunal-journalists-trial-1236617579/
Objection.ai has just rebranded as ThePrimary.com, which seems to carry over some of the public sourcing and scoring mechanisms and less of the legalistic ones.
Doesn’t mean backers like Balaji Stevenson and Peter Theil, proponents of “network states” and parallel institutuons, won’t keep trying to build these things.
No_Teaching_8828 | 12 hours ago
Yeah, because the US government no longer cares about the basic well-being of the people, just enriching those in power.
While places like S. Korea actually want to help their people succeed, as they care about what's important for long term success as a nation. Whereas those in power here don't give a hoot about the long term, not their problem...
Traitorous aholes are pushing the whole world to hate us, while they snatch more wealth for private islands, super yachts, and underground bunkers, while creating entire nations who'd want to destroy us... Strategic dealmaking, I think not...
Straight-Ad6926 | 9 hours ago
Bold move comparing us to South Korea. Their idea of national well being is a 52-hour work week, a hype competitive rat race that makes Wall Street look like a daycare, and a birth rate so low the nation is effectively performing a speedrun on demographic collapse. But hey free tokens.
No_Teaching_8828 | 9 hours ago
Yeah, you're right about those. I was more lamenting the fact that the US is taking away existing social support programs, and definitely not adding new ones to help people like that one.
And it's nice to hear at least some countries trying to help their people in some way in this day and age... It just feels like the US is heading backwards, when we could do so much good, if there was the will in those with power...
WingerRules | 9 hours ago
You'll also need a face scan that is checked with the government to use it, just like the direction browsing the internet and using operating systems are going.
I suggest reading the summary /r/moderatepolitics of the Meta settlement. Part of the settlement is that everyone on the platform will soon be required to have their faces scanned. Accounts that refuse will have restrictions like being able to only access it for 2 hours a day and banned from accessing it from midnight to 6 am. Feeds will be filtered from even lawful content such as people talking about their mental health or fitness goals, and they will be vetted by content morality auditors. There are a ton of other wtf requirements outlined in the summary.
The goal if you read the settlement is to enforce this in a way that this becomes a requirement for every website.
big-papito | 13 hours ago
As if SK did not have enough problems, now they are going to have a whole bunch of people falling into AI psychosis, or at best, the population practicing cognitive surrender to a clanker and unlearning how to think for themselves.
GristForMaladyMill | 13 hours ago
It's going to be interesting seeing genuine, relevant skill-gaps appear between folks that refuse to use AI and those that embrace it.
Facktat | 13 hours ago
Honestly, I think that both ends of this are problematic. The challenge will be to land somewhere in the middle where you understand it, utilize it for personal growth but without relying on it.
GristForMaladyMill | 13 hours ago
Absolutely. I'm a software developer, so it has hit my industry hard. AI can produce code faster than a human can and the game has shifted to the higher-level mental work of planning, designing, and reviewing. Even then, subagents can offload some of that work with a human for final review. The common issues we've seen is either lazy devs or folks getting rusty with syntax, both of which can be solved pretty easily.
arctic_radar | 11 hours ago
Same boat and totally agree. One issue I keep having is that it’s hard to find reasonable discourse about how other people are implementing, what lessons they are learning etc. It’s either “AI will take your job in 6 months” hype nonsense, or the whole thread just has their heads firmly in the sand about it and downvoting any comment that dares to mention how useful it can be. The latter is much more common on reddit these days it seems.
Facktat | 11 hours ago
About the AI will take your job part. The more I see the potential of what AI can and can not do, the more I think that the biggest problem it will cause to the IT job sector will not be that it will replace all developers but that it will replace all junior developers while barely impacting the need for senior but then where will the seniors come from when there are no junior developers getting trained?
GristForMaladyMill | 11 hours ago
The floor just rises and we need to have our education curriculum embrace the shifted paradigm of development and teach the new tooling intentionally. In terms of expectations and responsibilities, entry level positions will be somewhere between where they were previously and a senior.
shadeandshine | 8 hours ago
The issue is less reliance and more about accountability it’s why ai is harmful to society. It can’t be allowed to make decisions cause who do you punish if it kills someone or pushes people to suicide (it’s already done these things). The other aspect is that it’s a pattern machine and it can have errors it’s why you can’t really practice some things alone cause you’ll only feed your mistakes and missteps and ai already does that cause of its sycophantic behavior. You can’t have it have any biases towards the user cause otherwise it will slowly taint the knowledge basis
AssignmentMammoth696 | 3 hours ago
The gap is going to be between individuals who use AI to critically solve problems, and those that blindly accept the response and are too lazy to dive deeper.
website-buyer | 10 hours ago
It’s like saying don’t rely on your phone, or on electricity…
Facktat | 8 hours ago
I mean, yeah if it would only work 9/10 correctly and rely on a business model which is completely unsustainable at the moment, I would say: Don‘t rely on your phone or electricity.
When we reach a point where it‘s as reliable than our current electricity grid and phone network, we can talk about reversing this advice but as of right now, I think it‘s better to just use but not trust AI.
chumpandchive | 13 hours ago
what skill gaps do you imagine there would be?
MrP1anet | 13 hours ago
Those who rely on AI too much will be deficient in complex and critical thinking and being able to rely on one’s self. Bulk foundational knowledge is number two.
chumpandchive | 13 hours ago
how does ai increase critical/cognitive thinking? the reliance on causes the opposite effect. offloading cognitive tasks and decisions onto claude. ai offers answers, not probing our minds, asking us deeper questions.
the other commenter was spot on, that skill gaps will show in niche markets/industries that are more complex and skilled by their nature.
bulk foundational knowledge are libraries and humans who have honed skills and made mistakes to hone those skills. ai scrapes libraries.
MrP1anet | 13 hours ago
I’m saying AI will reduce those two areas. Those that don’t rely on it so much will have a greater capacity and ability for critical and complex thinking. Having bulk foundational knowledge, rather than just getting pieces here and there from AI, lets someone be far more holistic and cerebral about any particular topic or field.
I edited the original comment to make that clearer.
GristForMaladyMill | 13 hours ago
Depends on the domain it's being used in. Broadly, though, harness management and shifting to more systems-oriented approaches and designing testable constraints to guide agentic workflows.
Folks that reject actually learning AI and treat them as simple chatbots are going to be late to learning how to use them effectively, which will work to their detriment especially in highly technical fields where its use is becoming a standard.
dyslexda | 9 hours ago
> are going to be late to learning how to use them effectively
I'd maybe believe this if "how to use AI" didn't change as fast as the models themselves. Without going too much into my own career, I'm in laboratory automation and informatics, developing tools and scripts to link parts of the lab together. I'm aware of, though not proficient in, everything you're describing. I haven't bothered trying to become proficient because "best practices" are always changing: what was good six months ago doesn't apply today, and what was good a year ago is alien to today's workflows. What I have tried has been hilariously useless (full agentic workflows are excellent for removing your mental model of how the code works, and turning your code base into spaghetti that might technically work but is impossibly brittle), so I'm happy staying as an observer for now.
So, the average person needs to learn it? It's like the folks saying three years ago they were "prompt engineers." Those skills (mostly knowing the quirks of a given model) are still slightly useful today, but it's a whole different game now. So if you learn the ecosystem around harness management today, who's to say that'll still be useful in a year's time?
And on top of that, the "average person" will never need to know anything about "harness management," agentic workflows, etc. It might be useful in the software dev world, but not really outside in the "real" world.
GristForMaladyMill | 9 hours ago
I think you're getting at a thing much broader than AI. I see that dynamic as a general effect of emergent technologies that change how one interfaces with their work. There's a burst of different, iterative approaches until a best practice settles and the industry coalesces around it.
I don't think the "average person" necessarily needs to learn that much about harnesses, subagents, workflow topology, etc. When I'm talking about skill gaps, I'm specifically talking about intra-industry or even intra-role gaps, mostly focusing on white collar industries.
MrD3a7h | 11 hours ago
That's a lot of buzzwords to say "I don't know how to write an email without an LLM doing it for me."
morty_morty | 13 hours ago
Even in non-technical fields it is creeping in. I'm learning as much as I can now to understand how it works beyond being a "simple chatbot". I'm not interested in being left behind or losing my job because of refusal to adapt.
SuccotashOther277 | 13 hours ago
AI isn’t hard to use though.
GristForMaladyMill | 13 hours ago
The entry-fee is low but actually using it well (especially in technical domains) is a skill. Most of the general public don't use it well.
theGoodDrSan | 9 hours ago
Serious technologies don't need a "get in while the going is good" pitch.
Being a late adopter of the Internet was just... not that big of a deal.
GristForMaladyMill | 8 hours ago
I never said anything to the effect of "get in while the going is good."
theGoodDrSan | 7 hours ago
>Folks that reject actually learning AI and treat them as simple chatbots are going to be late to learning how to use them effectively, which will work to their detriment
I see this "you'll be left behind" idea everywhere, and it's absurd.
ohanse | 13 hours ago
Don’t be eroding my skills advantages here.
I need to stay on that side of the line demarcating the permanent underclass.
Don’t wanna be one of them coal miner 2.0 types.
devliegende | 13 hours ago
Atrofied brains will be more sad than interesting
YoINVESTIGATE_311_ | 13 hours ago
I’ll rarely use AI and try to not use it as much as possible. The people who do use it in my office and family…are not great thinkers I’d say. I’ve overheard people using it to give responses to texts to friends. I think that might be a bit too much. And it doesn’t even seem to do a lot of these tasks well.
popsicle_of_meat | 8 hours ago
> I’ve overheard people using it to give responses to texts to friends.
This is really sad. Interacting with friends is one of the best parts of human life and experience. To start taking your heart & soul out of that is insulting.
GristForMaladyMill | 13 hours ago
How do you use AI?
YoINVESTIGATE_311_ | 5 hours ago
When I’m very convinced a stock is going to do well, I’ll ask AI for a bear case or vice versa. I think it’s great at finding reasons a stock isn’t as good as I thought. It’ll provide links to the articles it’s citing which I make sure to check are real since it’s effecting my trading decisions. I’ll also use it for photographer or videographer to made mask something out but that existed before and was just made a little bit better and little faster with AI.
PatchyWhiskers | 13 hours ago
Using AI is super easy, kids can figure it out. That's kinda the whole point of AI.
LeatherDude | 12 hours ago
Using AI is easy. Using AI correctly for large, complex tasks is not. (Yet)
GristForMaladyMill | 13 hours ago
Using a computer is super easy, kids can figure it out. That's kinda the whole point of computers.
Lemp_Triscuit11 | 13 hours ago
I will go from getting paid to Google people's error codes for them to putting them in the AI prompt for them lol
GristForMaladyMill | 13 hours ago
Or just piping them directly lol
Lemp_Triscuit11 | 12 hours ago
It is important for the integrity of this institution that I am seen clacking on my keyboard, thank you
GristForMaladyMill | 12 hours ago
You'll be paid to surf Reddit and you'll be ok with that
ToInfinity_MinusOne | 12 hours ago
And we’ve already seen how using computers and not reading and writing with a pen has lead to a decrease in literacy in the US in the last 10 years.
GristForMaladyMill | 12 hours ago
That's definitely more attributable to increased access to video media through streaming and short-form video content consuming a large part of the attention economy. People are simply reading less due to the media market we've cultivated, not because of computers themselves. I read even more now with the accessibility of a good e-reader.
Razorlance | 11 hours ago
This is because Americans are lazy and stupid.
MaltySines | 13 hours ago
I think it'll be some form of U-shaped or V-shaped distribution.
Dumb people will use AI in dumb and counterproductive (to their own social and or cognitive development) ways. Other people, who aren't dumb, but are simply unlucky enough to be in situations where access to good generative AI isn't available, isn't relevant, or is actively harmful, will also be shafted.
The largest chunk of the population will use it intermediately, in some situations but not others, following their own life experiences, and trial and error, and assessing how much it hurts or helps to use it in different domains. Results will vary and some people will have a better or worse time of it depending on how accurate their own assessments are of the long term pros / cons of AI use for the particular set of tasks they use it for. But generally it won't change their life prospects too much one way or the other
The smartest (or just the luckiest) in the population will be able to use AI to compliment their natural and acquired skills in a way that greatly increases their ability to find success in the world, in whatever ways they may define that.
The question is what will the proportions of these three rough tiers be and what will influence who falls in which tier. That will largely depend on how the capabilities, costs, and knowledge about the inner workings of these systems evolve over the next several years or longer.
PrivilegedPatriarchy | 11 hours ago
Every technology falls into that kind of distribution that you're describing.
The dumbest people in the world wrap their car around a tree going 120 while drunk.
The dumbest people in the world are addicted to social media.
Other people used vehicles to transform the logistics of their business, or used social media to market their product.
MaltySines | 8 hours ago
The last part is the most important. Different technologies have certainly had widely different benefit/cost profiles depending on where on the socioeconomic totem pole you are, especially when they're new. There's a whole sci-fi genre based on extrapolating this pattern into the future.
urbrainonnuggs | 13 hours ago
Nah it's actually mass surveillance that's the top issue
awkwardbirb | 13 hours ago
It's both, not one or the other.
Joltizer | 13 hours ago
You doom scroll way too much
big-papito | 13 hours ago
Nah, broh - I have an agent for that.
Joltizer | 13 hours ago
I wish you were as clever as you thought you were
MrP1anet | 13 hours ago
You are being paternalistic while also underestimating a legitimate concern and threat from extreme AI use. Classic.
Joltizer | 13 hours ago
No, I am not being paternalistic. Please make sure you know what the word means before using it incorrectly
There is very little legitimate threat from AI use, the concerns are not legitimate, and completely disproportionate from reality
These views are only held by uneducated redditors
MrP1anet | 12 hours ago
Yes, you are. You assume you know what is best for everyone and that they are beneath you.
You saying there is very little threat with such high confidence over something that is extremely uncertain is pretty hilarious. It’s exactly what we mean when we say people’s ability to critically think on their own is jeopardy. Although, in your case that may have been a preexisting condition.
You’ve closed yourself off from any dissent or challenge to your worldview. Humble yourself. You are a tenth as clever as you think you are.
Joltizer | 12 hours ago
No I am not. I simply pointed out he doom scrolls too much
> You saying there is very little threat with such high confidence over something that is extremely uncertain is pretty hilarious
Not as funny as you thinking your uneducated view is equal just because you are biased towards balance
> It’s exactly what we mean when we say people’s ability to critically think on their own is jeopardy
You seem to lack self awareness and love to project
> You’ve closed yourself off from any dissent or challenge to your worldview
More projection. I do not accept challenges of my worldview from uneducated people who are just repeating talking points they got on social media
> Humble yourself
Take your own advice
> You are a tenth as clever as you think you are.
That would make me 10 times more clever than you
nuclearmeltdown2015 | 10 hours ago
Just curious do you use AI at all? And if so are you a daily user or very infrequent?
big-papito | 9 hours ago
I am a software engineer, so yeah, I use it every day, all day long.
nuclearmeltdown2015 | 9 hours ago
If you're a SWE I'm surprised you think AI makes you think less/cause brain rot.. my tasks have become larger and more complicated, it wouldn't have been feasible to do this amount of work in a short period of time. It does remove the need to think through the boring things like bugs but I think a bulk of the work still requires a lot of thought.
I love the AI. It's made me more productive and also removed the need for me to deal with the issues that made me want to quit my job stuck on problems nobody could help me with.
big-papito | 9 hours ago
You are talking of the toil. It removes the toil, but when my colleagues offload Slack responses and code review comments to Claude, I get pissed.
If I don't need to think, what is the point of my job.
owlbynight | 3 hours ago
The AI use case you're most worried about akin to spelling 8008135 on a graphing calculator.
LLMs are not conversational tools. They are business tools and mass early adoption is very smart. Kids will need to learn how to use them to compete.
I work for a fairly prestigious University as a software engineer and every single one of my colleagues is using it heavily on daily basis. I have more time to think than I ever have in my career. AI does not remove thinking. It removes pointless toil.
IndividualMouse4041 | 12 hours ago
In Korea there isn’t even a lot of thinking for yourself to begin with. It’s memorizing facts for grades, not critical thinking, and doing what your manager says to obey and meet deadlines as quick as possible. It makes sense AI got embraced.
Efficient_Cost_7436 | 11 hours ago
You’re like a crazy person complaining that calculators cause people to not be able to do math for themselves.
_allycat | 13 hours ago
>The services are expected to connect to government systems rather than function solely as standalone chatbots.
I'm calling it now. It's just government customer support chat bots.
Happy_Feet333 | 13 hours ago
Looks like South Korea is about to experience a boom in AI-generated porn... and sex chats.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.
szu | 13 hours ago
This is going go be abused to hell. Free unlimited tokens.
Extraordinary_yfj | 11 hours ago
People in America often resist AI because they’re afraid of losing valuable, well-paying jobs. In many other countries, people may embrace AI more readily because they have less to lose and more to gain.
Beneficial-Ad-8127 | 6 hours ago
I don’t think this is the only reason Americans often resist Ai. Many Americans see the harm that comes with Ai infrastructure, big one is the resources it is draining for a data center. A lot of energy and water are consumed.
For Koreans to have free Ai that’s fine but you get them hooked and dependent on it by making it accessible to anyone for free of the cost to there everyday lives and they will start to over look these of concerns the America is now faced with.
The only thing I see going for the states in general is just making models more power efficient like what China has been doing with their recent rounds of Ai models. Instead of expanding they should be focused on making their models efficient and not more costly.
2624926057 | an hour ago
That’s part of the equation, but there’s definitely more of a societal aspect as well. I’m an American living in Korea atm. Commercials in Korea are regularly chock filled with AI to the brim. No one bats an eye. Entire ads are made of AI from start to finish in movie theaters. Definitely a culture shock.
Reasonable_Fold6492 | 9 hours ago
For Korean and chinese netizens the anti ai people are the same neo confuicious scholars in the 19th century that refused to innovate.
They screamed at how injustice there trade with the west were while refusing to adopt technology. They just vented at how unfair it was as the west destroyed us. And by the end the country was left behind in the dust as the same scholars could only think about the good old days while there country became irrelevant.
Now I dont know if ai is realy gonna change society or its just another bubble but this is how many chinese and koreans thinks like.
Available-Reason9841 | 12 hours ago
Consumers have been anchored to think ai is like Google search and should be free or cost less than nothing to use. Giving away tokens like this will only make it harder to charge consumers the true cost. Giving these tokens away is basically a way to artificially create demand and subsidize growth. AI companies still cannot find a profitable business model but they still push forward, I just wonder how much longer this delusion can last.
uberschnappen | 4 hours ago
Title is misleading, it's more like public service agencies deploy free AI services for all South Korean citizens.
"The services are expected to connect to government systems rather than function solely as standalone chatbots."
Antique-Ad7635 | 4 hours ago
It’s because their economy depends on ai adoption and ai adoption depends on widespread use by the masses. Sk and samsung have already priced it in.
DontBanMeIncels | 11 hours ago
Lots of boomer here that is afraid of technology and changes.
AI is here to stay regardless if you like it or not. Learn it or get left behind
lespaul991 | 10 hours ago
Their birth rate is among the lowest (if not the lowest) in the world. They need a productivity boost somehow to keep up with their economic growth if they don't want to disappear.
Also their economy is quite peculiar. It's a sort of social capitalism managed by a government and an oligopoly of companies (Samsung, Hyundai, LG, etc.).
People who say it's the biggest success story of capitalism don't want to see the real effects: among the highest suicide rate and lowest birth rate in the world, high sleep deprivation, burnout and overwork.
Jristz | 6 hours ago
No, they DO know the real effect is just they don't care even if they affect them because in they mind suicide is better than Cuba or china and a "small price they are willing to pay".
Independent-Ad-2292 | 5 hours ago
Korean government is being smart.
At the foundational level, every Korean will benefit from AI capability - education, innovation, productivity...Koreans are already highly educated and learning focused.
Free access will make it uneconomical for US AI providers (e.g., OpenAI, Anthropic...) to invest in differentiating for Korean market. This will give room for Korean AI ventures to invest and find market for specialized AI offering.
Most critically, Korea will be able to retain and grow AI competitiveness that will be critical to continuous prosperity. K-AI.
JC_Hysteria | 10 hours ago
This is very interesting…
Governments know the inherent + potential power these systems have, and they’re capitalizing on it.
While the US fights itself on its existing capital expenditures, other countries see their opportunity in embracing the inevitable.