During the Cold War, physicists shared truth before nationality. The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) was established in 1954, when East and West were sharply confronting each other. Apart from the nuclear bomb race, it was possible to build accelerators and detectors together and analyze data jointly. The reason national interest conflicts could not block basic science cooperation is simple. Truth does not diminish when shared, and experimental results do not become the asset of any single country.
The landscape surrounding artificial intelligence (AI) today both resembles and differs from that era. While the United States and China wage a hegemonic competition in semiconductors, data centers, and model development, so-called mid-tier AI nations such as South Korea, Canada, France, and Japan are each pouring trillions of won into securing their own AI sovereignty. What if these countries joined forces for joint development?
Reality is not as simple as expectations. Data has difficulty crossing borders due to personal information regulations and data residency requirements. Graphics processing units (GPUs) and power infrastructure have established themselves as strategic assets in each country. The moment commercial interests arise from joint development, each party's interests come to the fore. CERN's success was an exception because the outcomes of basic physics did not translate directly into economic gains.
The areas where mid-tier AI nations can cooperate relatively easily may find their answer in talent and research networks. Researchers cross borders, knowledge is not depleted when shared, and joint papers do not become the exclusive asset of any particular country. By focusing on basic research that seeks to understand the principles of AI, a certain distance can be kept from commercial use, and actual commercialization can be left to companies, relatively reducing the room for conflicts of interest between nations.
The National AI Research Lab (NAIRL) started from this awareness. Under the support of the Ministry of Science and ICT and the Institute of Information & Communications Technology Planning & Evaluation (IITP), 45 professors from four universities — the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Korea University, Yonsei University, and POSTECH — operate as one team under a single hub, and within just over a year of its launch, they have published 186 papers at the world's most prestigious academic conferences. Behind this achievement was synergy between research labs that would have been difficult to create at any individual university. And this capability is already drawing the attention of major overseas AI research institutions. Leading AI research institutions from various countries — including the AIP Center under RIKEN, Japan's largest national research institute, and IVADO, Canada's representative AI research consortium — have chosen the hub as their Korean partner. The participation of 19 overseas professors from the United States, Canada, France, and the UAE as joint researchers is part of this trend. What matters in international cooperation is a connection structure that operates continuously. The hub plans to make this network publicly visible at the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) in July this year.
In the AI era, a nation's technological sovereignty is not determined by GPU holdings alone. Who one is connected to, what knowledge one absorbs first, and what global agendas one can set together will also become important variables in the long term. Just as CERN became the birthplace of the World Wide Web (WWW) and left a major mark on distributed computing beyond physics research, basic research cooperation networks can also build national capabilities in unpredictable ways. We hope that Korea will become the central axis of research cooperation among mid-tier AI nations, with the National AI Research Hub at its core.
