Bae Kyunghoon: "Three-Year Golden Opportunity for No.1 Physical AI... Building a General-Purpose Model Based on World Model"

Physical AI Designated as a National Strategic Industry

Bae Kyunghoon, Deputy Prime Minister for Science and Minister of Science and ICT, announced on June 29 that the government will intensively foster the field of physical artificial intelligence (AI) as a national strategic initiative, with the goal of becoming the global leader in this area.

Yonhap News Agency

At the “Korea Grand Leap Three Mega Projects National Briefing” held at the Blue House on the same day, Deputy Prime Minister Bae stated, “The next three years are the golden window of opportunity to become the world’s number one in physical AI,” and added, “The government will designate physical AI as a national strategic industry and lead its development.”

Deputy Prime Minister Bae emphasized that physical AI is fundamentally different from conventional robots. He explained, “Traditional robots have been passive tools operating on rule-based systems guided by humans, but physical AI perceives situations, predicts decisions, and acts like a human.” He added, “This autonomy is ushering in a period of transformation in both industrial sites and daily life.”

He also noted that Korea is optimally positioned to lead in physical AI. Deputy Prime Minister Bae stressed, “Korea has a robust industrial infrastructure based on strong manufacturing capabilities and world-class AI expertise, and global top-ranked semiconductor companies are based here.”

Deputy Prime Minister Bae identified data acquisition as a core strategy. He explained, “While generative AI has access to data equivalent to 100,000 years, physical AI only has about 10,000 hours’ worth—an extremely insufficient amount. It may take as long as 100,000 years to bring physical AI up to the current level of large language models (LLMs).” He continued, “It is crucial to collect real-world data and simultaneously build virtual simulation environments to generate synthetic data.”

Once this data foundation is established, the plan is to develop, within three years, a general-purpose physical AI foundation model based on a ‘world model’ that can understand the real world and predict actions. Based on this, specialized models will be developed and applied in various fields, while also promoting the localization of the entire physical AI full stack, including robots, general-purpose physical AI models, world models, and network security.

Deputy Prime Minister Bae stated, “We will support demonstration projects in diverse fields such as agriculture, manufacturing, and safety care, and actively back efforts so that the physical AI platform can become an export industry.”

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.