※[Global Morning Briefing] summarizes global news delivered by Seoul Economic Daily.
Xi to Visit Pyongyang After 7 Years; Rail and Customs Routes to Reopen
Chinese President Xi Jinping will make a state visit to Pyongyang on June 8-9 to hold a summit with State Affairs Commission Chairman Kim Jong-un. The visit, his first to North Korea in seven years since 2019, is seen as marking the start of a full restoration of North Korea-China relations through high-level exchanges, after ties were severed following the COVID-19 pandemic.
The visit serves as a reciprocal trip for Kim's attendance at China's Victory Day events last September, while also commemorating the 65th anniversary of the North Korea-China Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance, scheduled for July 11. North Korea's Korean Central News Agency and China's Xinhua News Agency simultaneously announced Xi's visit schedule on June 5.
Experts predict the summit will lead to visible results in economic cooperation between the two countries. Following the resumption of rail and air routes between Beijing and Pyongyang, signs of a new customs facility near the New Yalu River Bridge have been detected, with the admission of Chinese group tourists to Wonsan-Kalma and Pyongyang and the resumption of logistics networks cited as key agenda items. Kim Dong-yup, a professor at the University of North Korean Studies, forecast that expanded North Korea-China logistics exchanges are likely to materialize.
On the security front, analysts suggest China's influence will grow again in North Korea's diplomatic structure, which had tilted toward Russia after the Russia-Ukraine war. Yang Moo-jin, a chair professor at the University of North Korean Studies, analyzed that North Korea also needs China's support in pursuing its strategic line following the 9th Party Congress. As Xi recently held a summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin, attention is focused on whether this will lead to strengthened trilateral cooperation among North Korea, China and Russia. However, a senior presidential office official expressed a cautious stance, saying it is more appropriate to view the visit as a North Korea-China high-level exchange rather than a strengthening of North Korea-China-Russia solidarity.
New Drugs to Finance, All Set to Change? China Opens the 'Quantum Memory' Era First
China has succeeded in the world's first experimental implementation of quantum random access memory (QRAM), a key component to solve the chronic bottleneck problem of quantum computers. Amid intensifying US-China technological hegemony competition, this draws attention as China has achieved a preemptive result in a next-generation core technology field.
A research team at Zhejiang University published findings in the March issue of the international academic journal Nature Physics that they actually implemented a QRAM structure on a superconducting quantum processor. QRAM is a technology that allows a quantum computer to read conventional data in the form of 0s and 1s all at once in a superposition state, and it is a prerequisite for many quantum algorithms to actually achieve their theoretical speeds. Lu Li-chang, an assistant professor at Zhejiang University and co-author of the paper, said the team succeeded in operating, for the first time, a QRAM prototype that accesses 4-bit and 8-bit data.
If this achievement leads to a commercialization stage, ripple effects are expected across various industries, including shortening new drug development cycles through analysis of hundreds of millions of chemical databases, fraud detection based on vast financial transaction records, and improved quantum AI processing capabilities utilizing large-scale big data.
However, the academic consensus is that considerable time is needed before actual commercialization. This demonstration is essentially at the proof-of-concept level: the accuracy, currently at 60%, must be raised to over 99%, and challenges remain such as processing millions to hundreds of millions of bits, error correction and qubit expansion. Some forecast that at least 10 years will be needed to connect the hardware, algorithm and application stages.
The Chinese government designated quantum technology as one of seven future industries in its 15th Five-Year Plan announced this March. In response, the US Department of Commerce decided last month to provide a total of about 3 trillion won in support to nine quantum computing companies, including IBM, continuing the competition for technological leadership.
AI Makes AI: Why Developers Want to Install a 'Stop Button'
Major artificial intelligence (AI) developers have called for international-level control measures, saying the stage of "recursive self-improvement (RSI)," in which AI designs and develops its own successor models, is becoming visible. The concern is that if AI capabilities escape the range of human control, they could cause serious chaos across society.
Anthropic, through its official blog on June 4, warned that a failure to control RSI could cause enormous chaos in society, and proposed an international agreement that includes the option to slow down or temporarily halt development. In fact, Claude, developed by Anthropic, advanced in just over two years from handling four-minute software tasks in March 2024 to instantly processing 12-hour tasks, and Anthropic forecast that at this pace it will be able to perform tasks lasting several weeks next year. OpenAI also said last December that it is researching how to safely develop and deploy RSI-capable AI. Mostafa Dehghani, a researcher at Google DeepMind, diagnosed that RSI is quietly underway at nearly every major AI lab and is moving toward full automation.
However, views within the industry are divided. Meta, while acknowledging safety concerns, revealed its intent to develop the technology by publishing a research paper on a "hyper-agent" utilizing AI self-improvement on its website. Some criticize that Anthropic's warning is a marketing strategy to slow competitors' development pace and maintain its dominant position. Yann LeCun, an authority in the AI field, raised a counterargument against excessive risk rhetoric, saying that achieving human-level intelligence itself is impossible based on the currently mainstream large language models (LLMs).
Iran Rejects Trump's Outstretched Hand; Even Oman Turns Its Back
US President Donald Trump expressed a willingness to hold a direct meeting with Mojtaba Khamenei, the son of Iran's supreme leader, but negotiations are facing difficulties as Iran effectively expressed its rejection. Amid the rising level of US pressure on Iran, the deadlock continues as even mediator Oman rejected US demands.
Meeting with reporters on June 4, President Trump took the unusual stance that he "would consider it an honor" to meet Mojtaba and that a meeting would be possible if a nuclear deal is reached. This is interpreted as reflecting a calculation that direct negotiations alone with Mojtaba, who rarely appears in public, could constitute a diplomatic achievement. However, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi effectively expressed his refusal in an interview with the Lebanese outlet Al Mayadeen Network, saying, "We must think realistically."
The US, raising its level of pressure, issued a bombing threat after reports emerged that Oman, which is adjacent to Iran across the Strait of Hormuz, had held talks with Iran on managing passage through the strait. However, Oman did not accept the US demands, countering that it had discussed the matter within the scope of compliance with international law. Iran's navy is also reported to have carried out warning fire toward a US destroyer with Ghadir missiles and a new type of attack drone.
As negotiations drag on, changes are also appearing in the crude oil market. According to Morgan Stanley, crude oil arriving in China plunged from 13 million barrels per day last year to 7.5 million barrels over the past month. The market analyzes this as China depleting inventories it stockpiled during the low-oil-price period, and as a result international crude oil prices have remained below $100 per barrel. Meanwhile, there were also reports that Iran had notified Pakistan it was ready to transfer part of its uranium stockpile to a third country, but the official media of Iran's Revolutionary Guard flatly denied that any such agreement existed.
