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The landmark Namsan Seoul Tower.

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South Korea’s dominance in the memory chip market and a robust artificial intelligence ecosystem gives it an advantage in the global AI chip race, said industry observers.

“South Korea is very strong in memory chips. AI does require a lot of memory. South Korea dominating in the memory market is definitely an advantage,” said James Lim, senior research analyst at Dalton Investments.

South Korea is aiming to become one of the world’s top three AI powerhouses by 2027, following closely behind the U.S. and China, according to the nation’s “digital strategy.”

The country’s minister for science and information and communications technology, Jong-ho Lee, told CNBC the country “aims to maintain its leading position in the memory semiconductor field.”

“South Korea seeks to emerge as a prominent player in rapidly growing and promising areas such as AI semiconductors,” said Lee.

Large language models such as ChatGPT — which caused global AI adoption to explode in recent months — are increasingly in need of high-performance memory chips. Such chips enable generative AI models to remember details from past conversations and user preferences in order to generate humanlike responses.

Our A.I. chip is optimized exclusively for A.I. computation, says South Korean startup

Generative AI is a type of artificial intelligence that can generate content such as text, images, code and more.

“In order for the use of AI, including ultra-large language models, a significant number of semiconductor chips are required to operate, and global companies are competing fiercely to create high-performance and low-power AI semiconductors optimized for AI computation,” Lee said.

Chip giants Samsung, SK Hynix

South Korean firms Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix are two of the world’s largest dynamic random-access memory chipmakers and have been actively investing in AI research and development to bolster their capabilities.

Samsung in March said that it plans to invest 300 trillion Korean won ($228 billion) in a new semiconductor facility in South Korea.

Samsung is “spending and spending and spending,” Dylan Patel of research and consulting firm SemiAnalysis told CNBC last month. “And why is that? So they can catch up on technology, so they can continue to maintain their leadership position.”

We will spare no effort to help Korea secure world-class AI semiconductor technology by leveraging our memory semiconductor capabilities to advance AI semiconductors…

Jong-ho Lee

Minister for Science and ICT

Data from research firm TrendForce showed that Samsung held a market share of 40.7% and SK Hynix held 28.8% in the same period in the fourth quarter of 2022, followed by Micron in third place at 26.4%. Memory chips are also used in computers, smartphones and tablets as storage devices.

“South Korea has a robust local AI ecosystem, capable of competing with global tech giants,” said Sung Nako, executive for large scale AI development at South Korean internet giant Naver.

ChatGPT maker OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman had urged South Korea to lead AI chip production during his meeting with South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol in June. Altman also expressed interest in investing in South Korean startups and partnering with major chipmakers like Samsung Electronics.

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“U.S. chip giants Nvidia, Intel — they are not involved in the memory business. They don’t have any exposure in the memory space,” said Dalton’s Lim, adding that this would give South Korea an advantage.

Samsung is the supplier of high bandwidth memory chips to Nvidia, which fit into the U.S. chipmaker’s latest A100 graphics processing units that train ChatGPT.

Geoffrey Cain, author of the 2020 book “Samsung Rising,” told CNBC last month that he sees Samsung “diving deeper into the logic chip segment. So, [that’s] the AI chips, the future applications for semiconductor technology.”

An ‘upper hand’

The South Korean government is investing heavily in AI.

In 2022, the MSIT said it will be deploying 1.02 trillion won ($786 million) of funding for AI semiconductor research and development over the next five years.

“AI not only drives the growth of digital industries such as cloud computing and metaverse but also serves as a key factor in dramatically improving productivity in traditional industries such as manufacturing and logistics,” Lee told CNBC.

“With AI being applied across various domains, even greater economic ripple effects can now be anticipated,” he said.

South Korea will also allocate 826.2 billion won through 2030 to build high-end chips through new data centers and working with startups.

In a press release last month, the minister said that “the economic and industrial value of AI semiconductor will continue to improve and Korea has the upper hand in the memory chip [sector] and foundry.”

“We will spare no effort to help Korea secure world-class AI semiconductor technology by leveraging our memory semiconductor capabilities to advance AI semiconductors in stages by 2030, developing additional to apply them to data centers, and fostering AI semiconductor experts,” he said in the release.

Investors are showing a 'high interest' in backing A.I. startups in South Korea, VC firm says

In a bid to challenge to U.S. chip giants, South Korean AI chip design startup Rebellions claimed its new chip surpassed performance standards, outperforming Nvidia’s equivalent GPUs by more than three times.

“In terms of AI workload, we have much better energy efficiency, cost efficiency … sometimes better performance,” Rebellions co-founder and CEO Park Sung-hyun told CNBC in May.

Rebellions is reportedly racing to win government contracts as Seoul aims to bolster its local companies.

“I see a lot of — thanks to OpenAI’s ChatGPT — founders starting companies in the region, and also a lot of investors, with the support from the government, showing a high interest in backing these startups,” said JP Lee, CEO and managing partner at SoftBank Ventures Asia, on CNBC’s “Street Signs Asia.”

— CNBC’s Katie Tarasov contributed to this report.

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Salesforce’s Agentforce software is coming to OpenAI’s ChatGPT later this year

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Salesforce's Agentforce software is coming to OpenAI's ChatGPT later this year

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff participates in an interview during the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Jan. 22, 2025.

Chris Ratcliffe | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Salesforce is ramping up partnerships with leaders in generative artificial intelligence as investors continue to fear that the software company faces business risks due to the rapid growth of AI.

Just ahead of its annual Dreamforce conference in San Francisco, Salesforce said Tuesday it will enable the use of AI models from OpenAI and Anthropic inside its Agentforce 360 software. A day earlier, Salesforce expanded Agentforce beyond text chats to also handle voice calls.

“The way people are going to interact with software is going to fundamentally shift,” said Brian Landsman, CEO of Salesforce’s AppExchange business and executive vice president of partnerships, in an interview. The interaction could be in ChatGPT or in Slack, he said.

Salesforce will collaborate with Anthropic to bring Agentforce 360 into Claude, Landsman added.

Shares of Salesforce are down about 26% this year, while the S&P 500 index has gained 13%, as Wall Street seeks faster revenue growth from the cloud software company. So far, Agentforce revenue has been “modest,” Morgan Stanley analysts, who have the equivalent of a buy rating on Salesforce, wrote in a Monday note.

Large software companies are increasingly turning to popular AI model developers for new capabilities. Atlassian, Datadog and Intuit have previously signed deals with OpenAI, and Microsoft has invested almost $14 billion in the company. In September, Databricks committed to spending $100 million on OpenAI models.

As part of Salesforce’s announcement, customers will be able to access corporate information in Agentforce 360 and create charts in Tableau through the ChatGPT assistant, which has more than 800 million weekly users. Last week OpenAI announced a software development kit for integrating third-party applications into ChatGPT.

Companies working with both OpenAI and Salesforce will be able to sell products through ChatGPT’s instant checkout feature later in 2025. Salesforce plans to work with Anthropic on selling products for regulated industries, starting with financial services.

OpenAI said last month that ChatGPT users would be able to purchase products from U.S. Etsy sellers and Shopify merchants.

Meanwhile, Salesforce said its engineering organization is adopting Anthropic’s Claude Code programming product.

“We plan to continue to go much deeper with these partners over time,” Landsman said.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has been defending his company’s position in the AI boom. And on last month’s earnings call, he said Anthropic and OpenAI both use Salesforce tools.

“All these next-generation AI companies ranging from OpenAI to Anthropic to everyone are on Slack,” Benioff, who is also Salesforce’s co-founder, told analysts. “And it is incredible how they’ve used that as their operating system and as their platform to run their companies.”

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Instagram rolls out PG-13 content guidelines for teenage users

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Instagram rolls out PG-13 content guidelines for teenage users

Instagram has installed a new privacy setting which will default all new and existing underage accounts to an automatic private mode.

Brandon Bell | Getty Images

Meta will now limit the content that teenage users can see on Instagram to what they would typically encounter in a movie rated PG-13, the social media company said Tuesday.

With the new content guidelines, Meta said it will hide certain accounts from teenagers, including those that share sexualized content or media related to drugs and alcohol. Additionally, teenagers on Instagram will not be recommended posts that contain swear words, though teen users can still search for it.

The changes come after the company has faced waves of criticism over its handling of child-safety and related mental health concerns on its platform.

As part of the changes, Instagram accounts with names or biographies with links to adult-themed websites like OnlyFans or liquor stores will be hidden from teens, the company said. Teen Instagram users will no longer able to follow those kinds of accounts, and if they already do, they will be unable to see or interact with the more adult-leaning content that they share.

Meta executives said during a media briefing that while the company’s previous content guidelines were already in line or exceeded PG-13 standards, some parents said they were confused about what kinds of content teens could view on Instagram. To provide clarity, Meta decided to more closely standardize its teen-content policies with movie ratings that parents could better understand, the executives said.

“We decided to more closely align our policies with an independent standard that parents are familiar with, so we reviewed our age-appropriate guidelines against PG-13 movie ratings and updated them accordingly,” the company said in a blog post. “While of course there are differences between movies and social media, we made these changes so teens’ experience in the 13+ setting feels closer to the Instagram equivalent of watching a PG-13 movie.”

The social media company has come under fire from lawmakers who claim that it fails to adequately police its platform for child-safety related issues.

The company then known as Facebook came under fire in 2021 when The Wall Street Journal published a report citing internal company research that showed how harmful Instagram was for teenage girls specifically. Other reports have also shown how easily teenagers can use Instagram to find drugs, including through ads run by the company.

Over the past year, Meta has rolled out several features intended to provide parents more transparency about how their teenagers are using the company’s apps. In July, Meta debuted new safety tools intended to make it easier for teenage Instagram users to block and report accounts as well as receive more information about who they interact with on the platform.

In August, the watchdog Tech Transparency Project released a report that alleged Meta’s ties and sponsorship of the National Parent Teacher Association “gives a sheen of expert approval” to its “efforts to keep young users engaged on its platforms.” The National PTA said in a statement that it doesn’t endorse any social media platform, while Meta said at the time that it is “proud to partner with expert organizations to educate parents about our safety tools and protections for teens, as many other tech companies do.”

Meta said its new Instagram content guidelines will begin rolling out Tuesday in the U.S., UK, Australia and Canada before expanding to other regions.

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California just passed new AI and social media laws. Here’s what they mean for Big Tech

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California just passed new AI and social media laws. Here's what they mean for Big Tech

Governor Gavin Newsom speaks at Google San Francisco office about ‘Creating an AI-Ready Workforce’ that new joint effort with some of the world’s leading tech companies to help better prepare California’s students and workers for the next generation of technology, in San Francisco, California, United States on August 7, 2025.

Tayfun Coskun | Anadolu | Getty Images

California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a series of bills Monday targeting child online safety as concerns over the risks associated with artificial intelligence and social media use keep mounting.

“We can continue to lead in AI and technology, but we must do it responsibly — protecting our children every step of the way,” he said in a release. “Our children’s safety is not for sale.”

The latest legislation comes as the AI craze ushers in a wave of more complex chatbots capable of deep, intellectual conversation and encouraging behaviors. Across age groups, people are leaning on AI for emotional support, companionship and in some cases, romantic connections.

A recent survey from Fractl Agents found that one in six Americans rely on chatbots and worry that losing access would stunt them emotionally and professionally. More than a fifth of respondents reported having an emotional connection with their chatbot.

Many lawmakers have called for laws requiring Big Tech to better protect against chatbots promoting unsafe behaviors such as suicide and self-harm on their platforms.

The bills signed into law by Newsom on Monday are intended to address some of those concerns.

The changes

One of the laws passed by California implements a series of safeguards geared toward AI chatbots.

SB 243 is the first state law of its kind and requires chatbots to disclose that they are AI and tell minors every three hours to “take a break.” Chatbots makers will also need to implement tools to protect against harmful behaviors and disclose certain instances to a crisis hotline.

The law allows California to maintain its lead in innovation while also holding companies accountable and prioritizing safety, Newsom said in a release.

In a statement to CNBC, OpenAI called the law a “meaningful move forward” for AI safety standards.

“By setting clear guardrails, California is helping shape a more responsible approach to AI development and deployment across the country,” the company said.

Another bill signed by Newsom, AB 56, requires that social media platforms including Instagram and Snapchat to add labels that warn users of the potential mental health risks associated with using those types of apps. AB 621, meanwhile, heighten penalties for companies whose platforms distribute deepfake pornography.

The other key law, known as AB 1043, requires that device makers, like Apple and Google, implement tools to verify user ages in their app stores. Some Big Tech companies have already endorsed the law’s safeguards, including Google and Meta.

Last month, Kareem Ghanem, Google’s senior director of government and affairs and public policy, called AB 1043 one of the “most thoughtful approaches” to keeping children safe online.

The impact to big tech

The new laws require a series of changes to many long-standing business models. But D.A. Davidson’s Gil Luria said companies should experience a “distributed” impact from these new measures, since all businesses are forced to accommodate the rules.

“For AI chats the timing is beneficial since these companies are still working out their business models and will now accommodate a more restrictive approach at the outset,” he said.

Other countries have already enacted rules tougher restrictions on AI. Last year, the European Union passed the AI Act that includes fines for companies that violate the laws’ framework that includes a social scoring systems.

Utah and Texas have also signed laws implementing AI safeguards for minors. The Utah law, for example, requires that Apple and Google to verify user ages and it requires parental permission for those under 18 to use certain apps. These laws have also raised questions over whether harsh restrictions violate free speech or bans are the most effective solution.

California isn’t the first jurisdiction to pass laws like these, but Newsom’s signings carry significance due to the size of the state’s population and the fact that many tech companies are based in the San Francisco Bay Area.

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