Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg met with South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol in Seoul on Thursday to discuss AI cooperation and methods to minimize the spread of fake news before of important elections, according to Yoon’s administration.
Zuckerberg is on a mini-tour of Asia that includes a stop in Japan and a three-day visit to Seoul, where he met with executives from electronics giants Samsung and LG. Next, he travels to India.
Yoon and Zuckerberg talked on collaboration between South Korean firms and Meta, “as well as the vision to create an AI digital ecosystem,” Yoon’s chief of staff for policy, Sung Tae-yoon 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 went on to say.
Yoon emphasized that South Korea, “with its diverse portfolio of smart electronics, wearable devices, and smart cars, can become an outstanding platform” to deploy Facebook parent Meta’s artificial intelligence, Sung added.
Yoon informed the Meta creator that Seoul would assist in any manner “if necessary,” Sung claimed, citing close supply chain cooperation mechanisms created between South Korea and the United States.
In view of important global elections this year, including a South Korean legislative vote in April and the US presidential election in November, Yoon ordered Meta’s CEO to “pay special attention” to monitoring and preventing fake news on their platform.
According to South Korea’s Yonhap news agency, Zuckerberg met with the CEO of consumer technology firm LG Electronics on Wednesday to explore extended reality (XR) initiatives.
According to the Korea Economic Daily, Meta is cooperating with LG to produce a premium headset to compete with Apple’s Vision Pro.
The Meta CEO also met with Lee Jae-yong, the CEO of Samsung Electronics, one of the world’s largest smartphone and computer chip manufacturers, to discuss prospective cooperation in AI memory chips and XR industries, according to Yonhap.
Samsung is one of the few businesses in the world that manufactures premium high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips designed specifically for AI processing.
Yonhap said that Zuckerberg also met with officials from at least five AI and XR businesses at Meta’s Seoul office.
Generative artificial intelligence, led by OpenAI’s ChatGPT, is a technology that can generate text, graphics, and audio in seconds using basic cues.
Its rapid progress has been hailed as potentially revolutionary in fields ranging from video games to politics, but it is not without risks.
Meta was one of 20 big tech companies, including OpenAI, to sign a vow last month to push down on AI content designed to confuse voters ahead of global elections this year.
According to Yonhap, Zuckerberg will leave Seoul on Thursday for India.
According to reports, he will attend the elaborate March 1-3 pre-wedding parties of Mukesh Ambani, head of Indian oil-to-telecoms firm Reliance, and his son.
Meta, Google, and others have invested billions of dollars in Reliance’s digital business Jio Platforms, which aims to compete with Amazon and Walmart in India’s massive e-commerce industry.