Zuckerberg, S. Korea’s President Yoon talk AI cooperation

Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg met South Korea’s President Yoon Suk Yeol in Seoul Thursday and discussed cooperation on AI and ways to prevent fake news circulation – Copyright South Korean Presidential Office/AFP Handout

Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg met South Korea’s President Yoon Suk Yeol in Seoul Thursday and discussed cooperation on AI and ways to prevent fake news circulation ahead of key elections, Yoon’s office said.

Zuckerberg is on a mini-tour of Asia that has included a stop in Japan, plus a three-day visit to Seoul where he met business leaders from electronics giants Samsung and LG. He heads to India next.

Yoon and Zuckerberg discussed cooperation between South Korean companies and Meta “as well as the vision to create an AI digital ecosystem”, Sung Tae-yoon, Yoon’s chief of staff for policy, told reporters.

“Yoon emphasised South Korean companies’ top place in the memory market for AI systems and asked Zuckerberg to forge close cooperations with them,” the official said.

Yoon stressed that South Korea “with its diverse portfolio of smart electronics, wearable devices and smart cars, can become an outstanding platform” to apply Facebook parent Meta’s artificial intelligence, Sung said.

Yoon told the Meta founder that Seoul would assist in any way “if necessary”, Sung added, pointing to close supply chain cooperation mechanisms established between South Korea and the United States.

In light of major elections globally this year — including a South Korean parliamentary vote in April and the US presidential election in November — Yoon asked the Meta chief to “pay special attention” to monitoring and preventing fake news on his platform.

On Wednesday, Zuckerberg met the CEO of consumer tech giant LG Electronics to discuss extended reality (XR) projects, South Korea’s Yonhap news agency reported.

Meta is collaborating with LG to develop a premium headset that will compete with Apple’s Vision Pro, the Korea Economic Daily reported.

The Meta boss also met Lee Jae-yong, the head of Samsung Electronics — one of the world’s biggest producers of smartphones and computer chips — to explore potential collaborations in AI memory chips and XR businesses, Yonhap reported.

Samsung is among the few companies worldwide that manufacture premium high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips tailored for AI processors.

Yonhap said Zuckerberg also met representatives from at least five AI and XR startups at Meta’s Seoul office.

Spearheaded by OpenAI’s ChatGPT, generative artificial intelligence is a technology that can conjure up text, images and audio from simple prompts in just seconds.

Its rapid development has been heralded as potentially revolutionary for everything from video games to politics — but is not without risks.

Meta was one of 20 major tech firms, including OpenAI, to sign a pledge this month to crack down on AI content intended to deceive voters ahead of elections around the world this year.

Yonhap reported that Zuckerberg will leave Seoul on Thursday for India.

He will attend the lavish March 1-3 pre-wedding celebrations of the son of Mukesh Ambani, chairman of Indian oil-to-telecoms giant Reliance, reports said.

Meta, Google and others have invested billions of dollars in Reliance’s digital unit Jio Platforms as it seeks to take on Amazon and Walmart in India’s vast e-commerce market.