The 4th Samsung CEO Summit held in San Francisco

The 4th Samsung CEO Summit held in San Francisco. October. 13, 2018 07:48. rocku@donga.com.
“We have the power to create artificial intelligence that would reformulate the world," Samsung Electronics’ President and Chief Strategy Officer Sohn Young-kwon confidently made the remarks at the Samsung CEO Summit, which took place under the theme “A Better World with AI” at Masonic Center in San Francisco, the U.S. on Thursday (local time). The fourth annual event is a venue where major investors, distinguished scholars, and key Samsung officials gather in San Francisco to discuss the latest trend in IT industry.

“Samsung Electronics is No. 1 in semiconductors, which serve as basis for AI,” Sohn said. “We are already installing AI on other products including smartphones.” Singling out health care and autonomous driving as key areas of artificial intelligence, the Samsung president emphasized far-reaching potentials of AI. He stopped short of disclosing detailed investment plans, but expressed commitment that Samsung will lead the cutting-edge IT field focused on AI.

Samsung has recently been focusing on laying the foundation to secure future growth engines in order to continue its astonishing strides in semiconductor and smartphone businesses. The electronics giant singled out AI, 5G mobile telecom, automotive electric parts, and bio industries as its four new businesses for future growth, and announced a plan to invest 25 trillion won (approximately 22 billion U.S. dollars) in these areas through 2020. It opened AI research centers at six locations worldwide including Silicon Valley, and Toronto in Canada in order to secure growth in new businesses, and plans to present development direction for its voice recognition AI platform "Bixby" at the Samsung Developer Conference in San Francisco next month.

In attendance at the CEO summit were Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller, who are teaching computer science at Stanford, and Regina Dugan, Facebook’s Regina Dugan, the head of Building 8 research, to discuss the future of AI and development direction of related industries. Ng said that it is now possible most of the things that humans can recognize in a second will be automated, predicting that AI will emerge as the basis for new industries of the future.