Baek Byung-yeul is a journalist at The Korea Times focused on cultural content, including films and cultural events in South Korea. You can contact him at baekby@koreatimes.co.kr to share your insights.
Naver, SK Telecom clash over AI manpower
Chung Suk-geun, former CEO of Naver CLOVA and current CEO of SK Telecom Americas / Courtesy of Naver
By Baek Byung-yeul
By Baek Byung-yeul
Naver and SK Telecom are clashing over hiring artificial intelligence (AI) experts as the race to develop AI-based services intensifies, according to company officials, Wednesday.
Naver Cloud, Naver's subsidiary that supervises its AI business, said it served notice to SK Telecom through a law firm on June 15, asking the mobile carrier to refrain from headhunting its AI development professionals.
The letter stated that it could not tolerate a situation in which SK Telecom was serially recruiting its senior employees, including former Naver CLOVA CEO Chung Suk-geun as CEO of its U.S. subsidiary SK Telecom Americas. Chung was known for his contributions to the development of Naver's hyper-scale language model HyperCLOVA.
A Naver Cloud spokesperson said that five senior employees who worked with Chung have also submitted their resignations in order to move to SK Telecom.
“Five leadership-level employees who worked with Chung have resigned. Some of them are veteran employees with more than 15 years of experience. We have not accepted their resignations. When we asked them why they resigned, they said they wanted to move to SK Telecom's AI company,” the Naver Cloud official said, adding that SK Telecom's practice of poaching its professionals may violate the Unfair Competition Prevention and Trade Secret Protection Act.
“We want both sides to resolve this issue amicably," the spokesperson said. “We want SK Telecom to give us a clear answer on this issue.”
In response, an SK Telecom spokesperson confirmed that the company received the certification of content from Naver Cloud, but added “there has been a misunderstanding between the two sides and we are trying to solve it through communication.”
An industry official familiar with the matter said the competition for AI experts will only intensify in the future due to the race to develop AI services sparked by OpenAI's generative AI service ChatGPT. The official added that companies are now clearly witnessing that the market for AI services is growing tremendously, but there is an absurd shortage of people to develop them.
“The most important thing to develop AI services is how many quality professionals a company secures. The competition for skilled people will continue to intensify,” the official said on condition of anonymity.