Legislature still sitting on the AI Basic Act

The $2 trillion club in market cap is the current peak for a company. The exclusive club only has four members — Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Alphabet, Googe’s parent company. But Nvidia steals the show. It zoomed into the $2 trillion zone last February as its stock soared on the artificial intelligence craze. Nvidia is unrivalled in the sphere of artificial intelligence as it dominates a whopping 80 percent of the cutting-edge AI chips. SK hynix also owed its earning surprise in the first quarter to its high-bandwidth memory (HBM) which stacks Nvidia’s graphics cards (GPU).

AI has become a must-have asset for countries fighting for supremacy in global competitiveness in future industries. The United States enacted the National Artificial Intelligence Initiative Act of 2020 and injected a whopping $1.7 billion in the AI field in 2022 alone. U.S. President Joe Biden last year issued an executive order on the Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence. The European Union passed the EU AI Act, a regulation that sets rules and standards of AI application when using large language models (LLM). The regulations are aimed at protecting AI companies in the region. Japan is readying a legal framework for developing artificial intelligence in an AI strategy meeting later this month.

But Korea is moving at a snail’s pace while others are making fast strides to take the leadership in the AI sector. The National Assembly, still stuck in partisan battles, has failed to enact a bill to foster AI development. If the current legislative logjam continues, the bill to develop AI and build a trustworthy environment is headed for the trash can with less than three weeks left before the 21st Assembly expires on May 29.

Without a regulatory framework, the corporate players cannot but sit out in the game. Given potential side effects from unregulated data learning and applications, there must be specific guidelines to what companies can do and should not so that they can move on with their experimentations. Without any legal and systematic frameworks, our companies must run the risk of getting entangled with lawsuits and face challenges in dealing with negative socioeconomic outcomes such as deepfakes and fraudulent practices.

In the fast-moving AI age, any delay can be costly. Apple, once the icon of innovation, is scoring poorly in its sales and stock performance because it neglected the rapid AI development. Economic prosperity and job creation depend on the birth of new industries from corporate innovation. Stalled lawmaking and regulations must not deter the country’s industrial advance any longer.