South Korea is preparing a national program called "AI for All," which will integrate free and unlimited artificial intelligence into the country's public services. The initiative is scheduled to begin testing in September and expand nationwide by the end of the year.
The systems developed under this program will be capable of connecting to various governmental functions, assisting with activities such as scheduling medical appointments and calculating taxes, as reported by the Wall Street Journal.
One of the central objectives of this initiative is to promote the use of AI models created domestically, thereby reducing dependence on technologies from foreign nations, notably the United States and China. For this reason, the program does not offer subsidies for subscriptions to platforms like ChatGPT and Claude. Partner companies will be required to use South Korean models in at least 50% of the architecture of the services offered, according to the local newspaper Yonhap News.
Seoul has selected three private consortia to be part of this project. According to Reuters, these consortia are composed of the country's main telecommunications operators, including SK Telecom and KT, as well as the company responsible for Kakao, one of the most popular messaging apps in the region. Each consortium will have its own application, potentially incorporating AI features into platforms that already have an established user base in the country. Access to these services will be funded by the government and will have no usage restrictions.
Among the planned functionalities, the government has also allocated the distribution of up to 512 Nvidia B200 accelerators to the three consortia, as part of infrastructure investments in AI promoted by the current administration, led by President Lee Jae Myung. For this year, the administration has reserved approximately 10 trillion won, equivalent to about R$ 37 billion, for sector investments.
This program emerges in a context of a high AI consumption market. Official data cited by the WSJ indicates that about 25% of the South Korean population already pays for AI services. This percentage is nearly ten percentage points higher than what was observed in Brazil, where a Mobile Time survey in June showed 16% paying for AI services.
South Korea joins the group of governments investing in proprietary systems to reduce reliance on large technology corporations. Such investments range from developing proprietary models to increasing processing capacity and improving infrastructure. Countries such as Switzerland, Canada, and Singapore have already implemented national AI strategies, focusing on data sovereignty, professional training, and the dissemination of open models. France and Germany, meanwhile, are working on structures similar to those adopted by South Korea, but using European companies.
In Brazil, the Brazilian Artificial Intelligence Plan (PBIA) provides for investments in supercomputers, national cloud infrastructure, and the creation of advanced Portuguese language models. The Federal Government announced R$ 2.3 billion for this strategy in August of this year, with an expected receipt of about R$ 23 million by 2028.
