Korea shows sluggish progress in AI development

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Korea has been stagnating in artificial intelligence (AI) development at a time when the global AI race is heating up. In contrast, China is making remarkable strides to rapidly close the gap with the United States.

According to this year’s annual AI Index Report by Stanford University's Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, Korea's global private investment in AI recorded $1.33 billion last year, placing it 11th globally — behind countries such as the United States, China, Sweden and Austria. This marks a drop of two spots from the previous year when Korea ranked ninth with $1.39 billion.

The U.S. recorded $109.08 billion in total private investment in AI — a more than 60 percent increase from the previous year's $67.2 billion. This figure is 11.7 times greater than that of the second-highest country, China, which invested $9.3 billion, up from $7.76 billion the year before.

Data for global AI investment by country / Captured from The 2025 AI Index Report

The report showed a growing outflow of AI talent from Korea, with net AI talent migration per 10,000 LinkedIn members rising to 1.51 in 2024, up from 0.41 the previous year. The data suggests that experts in the field are increasingly leaving the country.

On a positive note, Korea has demonstrated strong performance in AI-related patents. The country saw the highest number of granted AI patents per 100,000 inhabitants in 2023, with 17.27 patents, followed by Luxembourg (15.31), China (6.08) and the U.S. (5.20). The previous year's figure stood at 10.26.

Meanwhile, the report assessed that China has been closing the AI performance gap with the U.S., especially with the introduction of DeepSeek.

The results showed that DeepSeek-R1 achieved the highest overall accuracy score of 84 percent, based on the Massive Multitask Language Understanding (MMLU) benchmark. GPT-o1-mini followed in second with a score of 80.3 percent.

“In 2024, U.S.-based institutions produced 40 notable AI models, compared to China’s 15 and Europe’s three. While the U.S. maintains its lead in quantity, Chinese models have rapidly closed the quality gap: performance differences on major benchmarks such as MMLU and HumanEval shrank from double digits in 2023 to near parity in 2024. China continues to lead in AI publications and patents,” it said.