AJU PRESS ASIA FIRST NEWS AGENCY

Journalist

Park Sae-jin
Park Sae-jin박세진
Assistant EditorForeign embassies in Seoul & Geopolitics, Diplomacy, Policy
Experienced journalist and editor at AJU PRESS specializing in multilingual news. I cover international diplomacy, geolpolitics, and policy, consistently delivering highly accurate, compelling reporting for a worldwide audience. "Reporting the facts. Shaping the narrative. Every second counts."
Latest by Park Sae-jin
  • KAIST develops AI chip with tunable response speed
    KAIST develops AI chip with tunable response speed SEOUL, August 07 (AJP) - KAIST researchers have built a semiconductor that can be set to react quickly or slowly, matching the pace of whatever information reaches it, and that keeps the setting after the power goes off. Arranged in a grid of 256, the devices predicted the course of a mathematical pattern used in the field as a difficulty test about four times more accurately than an identical grid with every device fixed at a single speed. Nature Communications published the work on July 4. Choi Shin-hyun, a chair professor in KAIST's School of Electrical Engineering and its Graduate School of Semiconductor Technology, led the team. He said the design lets a chip respond "in the way best suited to the rate at which data changes," and that he expects it to lift performance and cut power draw in self-driving cars, robots and wearable devices. Information does not arrive at one speed. A heartbeat shifts in thousandths of a second. Heat building inside a factory motor drifts over hours. Both are readings taken across time, and both land on a chip that has to make sense of them. Any chip reading that kind of stream carries two habits set at the factory. One is how fast it reacts when a new signal arrives. The other is how long it holds that signal before the trace fades. Fixed habits work when everything arrives at one rate. When fast and slow readings come in together, they do not. A chip that lets go too quickly loses the slow pattern. A chip that holds on too long smears the fast one. The KAIST device adds a control. Beneath the layer that handles the incoming signal sits a second layer holding electric charge. Adding charge there makes the device forget faster. Taking charge away makes it hold on longer. Once set, that level stays without any current to maintain it. Keeping a chip in a chosen state normally costs a steady trickle of power. The team moved the forgetting time between roughly 0.7 and 3.8 thousandths of a second, a span of about five times over. The range of signal speeds the device could follow ran from 182 to 1,912 cycles per second. It registered pulses as brief as 50 billionths of a second. The gain comes from mixing settings across many devices. On the 256-device grid, some fast and some slow, one chip follows quick and slow signals at once without software separating them out first. KAIST ran that grid on the Lorenz system, a pattern whose path is notoriously hard to forecast, and recorded the fourfold improvement. KAIST's announcement leads with a larger figure, a 40-fold cut in prediction error. That result came from a simpler test on an artificial signal, and it measures the device against itself with the control frozen. No artificial intelligence chip now on the market took part in the comparison. The university also said the grid matched software at the same task while drawing far less energy. It gave no number for the saving and named nothing to measure it against. The materials are ordinary ones. A five-nanometer layer of indium gallium zinc oxide does the processing. The control layer stacks silicon dioxide, hafnium oxide and silicon dioxide. KAIST said the combination works with the fabrication process behind most chips now in production, which matters for whether the design could ever be made in quantity. What exists so far is a laboratory component, 256 cells on a grid. The self-driving cars, the robots and the wearables are what Choi expects. None of them were tested. Kim Dae-won, a doctoral candidate at KAIST, is first author. Two researchers from Samsung Electronics' semiconductor research center are co-authors, one of them a company Fellow. KAIST did not say what Samsung contributed to the work, and did not name a funding source. (Reference Information) Journal/Source: Nature Communications Title: Programmable memtransistor array with temporal dynamics modulation for efficient time-series data processing Link/DOI: https://bit.ly/4gkOvzB ---- AJP Takeaways ● Choi Shin-hyun's KAIST team built a semiconductor whose reaction speed can be set to match how fast incoming information changes, moving its forgetting time between roughly 0.7 and 3.8 thousandths of a second and holding that setting with no power. ● Samsung Electronics has two researchers on the paper, one of them a company Fellow. KAIST did not say what the company contributed or name any funding source, and neither point appears in the university's announcement. ● A grid of 256 devices forecasts the Lorenz system about four times more accurately than the same grid fixed at one speed. The 40-fold figure KAIST leads with comes from a simpler test on an artificial signal and measures the device against itself, not against any AI chip on the market. ● Nature Communications published the work on July 4. 2026-08-07 11:02:15
  • Kookmin University opens AI alliance with 10 companies
    Kookmin University opens AI alliance with 10 companies SEOUL, August 07 (AJP) - SEOUL, August 07 (AJP) - A proposal to form a corporate consortium that would fund dedicated admission seats in artificial intelligence and software was raised at Kookmin University on July 24, at the launch of an industry alliance the Seoul school is building with 10 technology companies. Contract-based quotas let companies pay for places at a university under an agreement that links admission to employment with the sponsoring firms. The university's account of the meeting did not name who made the proposal, set a timeline, or say whether any company had committed to it. Kookmin University said Thursday that its College of Software Convergence has hosted the launch at the main administration building. The alliance is called the KMU AX Innovation Alliance, taking its name from AI transformation, the term used in South Korea for applying AI across an organization's existing operations. Son Jin-sik, the university's vice president for planning, and Hwang Sun-tae, dean of the software college, attended. Participants discussed joint projects, field training, internships, hiring pipelines and jointly operated courses, the university said. KT, NHN Cloud, TmaxTibero, Hancom InnoStream, Innogrid and Maum AI were among the companies represented, drawn from cloud computing, data, enterprise software, security and applied AI. The university did not say whether the firms had joined the alliance as members. Kookmin has held a government software designation since 2022, when the Institute of Information and Communications Technology Planning and Evaluation selected its software college for funding of up to 2 billion won a year. Fifty-eight universities hold the designation. The Ministry of Science and ICT began converting those schools this year into what it calls AI-centered universities, a program paying 3 billion won a year for as long as eight years. Seven were named on May 5. They were Gachon, Korea, Sogang, Sungkyunkwan, Soonchunhyang, Soongsil and Yonsei universities. Kookmin was not among them. The ministry said then that it would select three more in June from universities outside the software program. On July 2 it announced a separate expansion of eight additional places, restricted to software-designated universities outside the capital region. Kookmin, in Seoul, was not eligible for that round. The government has said it wants 30 AI-centered universities by 2030. The national AI action plan for 2026 through 2028, issued in February by the National AI Strategy Committee and the science ministry, calls for converting the software-designated universities into AI-centered ones and for expanding contract departments and other industry-demand-based training. Kookmin marks its 80th year in 2026 and has named eight priority fields under a long-term development plan. One of them is AI+X, the pairing of AI with other disciplines, and the alliance sits under that field. The university said it would hold regular exchanges and follow-up working-level consultations with the participating companies, and would keep expanding the network to firms in cloud and AI infrastructure, generative AI and AI agents, data, enterprise software, security and field-deployed AI. Its software college funding runs to December 2027. AJP Takeaways ● Kookmin University hosted the July 24 launch of the KMU AX Innovation Alliance, where a proposal was raised to form a corporate consortium funding dedicated admission seats in AI and software. The university did not name who made the proposal, set a timeline, or say whether any company committed. ● The Ministry of Science and ICT named seven AI-centered universities on May 5 without including Kookmin, then restricted a July expansion of eight further places to schools outside the capital region, leaving the Seoul university ineligible. Neither the selection round nor Kookmin's exclusion from it appeared in the university's announcement. ● KT, NHN Cloud, TmaxTibero, Hancom InnoStream, Innogrid and Maum AI were among 10 companies represented at the launch. The university did not say whether the firms had joined the alliance as members. ● The National AI Strategy Committee's action plan for 2026 through 2028 calls for converting South Korea's 58 software-designated universities into AI-centered ones and for expanding contract departments and other industry-demand-based training. 2026-08-07 09:44:27
  • Kazakhstan Begins Construction of 800km Highway Linking Caspian Sea
    Kazakhstan Begins Construction of 800km Highway Linking Caspian Sea Kazakhstan has commenced the construction of an 800-kilometer highway that will directly connect a border checkpoint with China to a port on the Caspian Sea. This project aims to integrate a road network into the Central Asian freight route that bypasses Russia.President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev announced the start of construction for three segments of the highway during a virtual ceremony on August 3 in Astana. He stated that once completed, the highway will reduce the freight transport distance from China to Europe by 1,000 kilometers and shorten delivery times by up to three days.The new segments will run from Mangystau's Beineu to Sekseuil. Sekseuil is a village located at the northeastern tip of the Aral Sea, and the Kazakh government and state media still refer to it by its Soviet-era name, Saksalusk. President Tokayev described the highway as a "golden bridge" connecting China and Europe.On the same day, construction also began on the expansion and reconstruction of the Kyzylorda-Sekseuil and Ulgaiysyn-Sekseuil segments, which together span 774 kilometers. The work will be carried out by Kazakh companies, creating over 10,000 jobs, and the government anticipates that the opening of these three roads will increase freight traffic by 2.5 times, reaching 13.2 million tons annually. The completion deadline is set for 2029.The routes being connected are officially named the International Trans-Caspian Transport Route, commonly referred to as the Middle Corridor. This route runs from western China through Kazakhstan, crosses the Caspian Sea by rail ferry, and continues through Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Turkey to Europe. A key feature of this route is that it does not pass through Russian territory.According to Kazakhstan's Ministry of Transport, freight traffic along this route has increased more than fivefold over the past seven years, rising from 800,000 tons to 4.5 million tons. Last year, container traffic was approximately 77,000 TEUs, and the ministry aims to reach 300,000 TEUs by 2029.The World Bank evaluated this route in 2023, suggesting necessary investments and regulatory improvements to triple the freight volume and halve transport times by 2030. It also highlighted infrastructure and logistics bottlenecks in Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Kazakhstan. This is a significant reason why the route currently falls short of the volumes previously handled by Russian railways.The Beineu segment has already been included in a project supported by the European Union (EU). Aleshkha Shimkichi, the EU Ambassador to Kazakhstan, stated during a meeting on the Trans-Caspian Transport Route in Astana on June 3 that the EU's €30 million transport support project includes preparations for the modernization of Aktau Port and the comprehensive improvement of the Beineu-Sekseuil road.Funding for the project has not yet been finalized. The Kazakh Prime Minister's office reported that international financial institutions and the Kazakhstan Development Bank are currently conducting bidding processes for the Beineu, Kyzylorda, and Ulgaiysyn projects, with a requirement to use domestic materials and labor. The total project cost has not been disclosed by either the presidential office or the government.President Tokayev first proposed the Beineu road at a meeting in Aktau in 2021, followed by technical investigations, feasibility studies, and funding efforts. The state news agency Kazinform quoted Yerlan Karin, the first deputy head of the presidential office, stating that this segment will pass through areas that previously lacked road infrastructure, noting that Kazakhstan's main transport network has historically only run along a north-south axis.On the same day, President Tokayev also outlined the overall road policy. There are eight international transport corridors passing through Kazakhstan, with over 35,000 vehicles crossing daily. Road freight transport volume has doubled in the past five years, with last year's revenue in this sector reaching 1.5 trillion tenge, approximately $3.2 billion. Last year, 13,000 kilometers of new and repaired roads were completed, of which 6,000 kilometers were opened to traffic.Kazakhstan plans to modernize 37 border inspection posts by 2028, with construction already underway at 14 of them. President Tokayev remarked that this effort marks the first such initiative since the country gained independence in 1991.* This article has been translated by AI. 2026-08-06 19:00:10
  • Kazakhstan starts 800km highway to Caspian ports
    Kazakhstan starts 800km highway to Caspian ports SEOUL, August 06 (AJP) - Construction began Monday on an 800-kilometer highway across western Kazakhstan that President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev said will connect crossings on the Chinese border directly to the Caspian ports of Aktau and Kuryk, giving trucks a direct route onto the trade corridor Europe has been funding as an alternative to shipping through Russia. Tokayev launched the project by video link from Astana along with two other road schemes. He said the new highway would shorten the freight route between China and Europe by 1,000 kilometers and cut delivery times to three days, and proposed naming it the Aral-Caspian Highway. The road runs from Beineu in Mangystau region to Sekseuil, the settlement on the northeastern edge of the Aral basin that Kazakh officials and state media still commonly call by its Soviet-era name, Saksaulsk. Tokayev told the broadcast the highway would function as a "golden bridge" between China and Europe. Work also started on capacity expansion and reconstruction of the Kyzylorda to Sekseuil and Ulgaysyn to Sekseuil highways, 774 kilometers between them. Kazakh companies will carry out the projects, creating more than 10,000 jobs, and freight traffic on the three roads is expected to rise 2.5 times to 13.2 million tons a year once they open. Tokayev set a completion deadline of 2029. The corridor the roads feed is formally the Trans-Caspian International Transport Route, generally called the Middle Corridor. It links western China to Europe through Kazakhstan, across the Caspian Sea by rail ferry, then through Azerbaijan, Georgia and Türkiye, bypassing Russian territory. Kazakhstan's Ministry of Transport says freight along the route has risen more than fivefold in seven years, from 800,000 tons to 4.5 million tons a year, with about 77,000 twenty-foot equivalent units moved in 2025. The ministry expects container traffic to reach 300,000 units by 2029. The World Bank assessed the corridor in 2023 and set out the investments and policy changes it said could triple freight volumes and halve travel times by 2030, alongside a diagnostic of infrastructure and logistics constraints in Azerbaijan, Georgia and Kazakhstan. Those constraints are the reason the route still moves a fraction of what the northern rail line through Russia once carried. The Beineu road has been on the European Union's list for some time. EU Ambassador to Kazakhstan Aleška Simkić told a Trans-Caspian corridor coordination workshop in Astana on June 3 that the bloc's 30 million euro transport support programme covers modernization of Aktau port facilities and preparatory work for the full modernization of the Beineu to Sekseuil road. Financing is still being arranged. The prime minister's office said international financial institutions and the Development Bank of Kazakhstan are running tender procedures for the Beineu, Kyzylorda and Ulgaysyn road projects, which are to use domestic materials and local specialists. Neither the presidential press service nor the government has published a total cost. Tokayev first proposed the Beineu road in 2021 at a meeting in Aktau, and technical studies, feasibility assessments and the identification of funding sources followed, first deputy chief of the presidential executive office Erlan Karin said, according to Kazakhstan's state news agency Qazinform. Karin said the route will be built through territory where no road previously existed, and that Kazakhstan's main transport lines have historically run north to south. Tokayev used the launch to set out the wider road program. Eight international corridors cross Kazakhstan carrying about 35,000 vehicles a day, road freight volumes have doubled in five years, and the sector earned 1.5 trillion tenge, about $3.2 billion, last year. Some 13,000 kilometers of road were built or repaired in 2025 and 6,000 kilometers opened to traffic. Kazakhstan is modernizing 37 road border checkpoints by 2028, with construction under way at 14 of them. Tokayev said the checkpoint overhaul would be the first of its kind since the country became independent in 1991. ---- AJP Takeaways ● Kassym-Jomart Tokayev launched construction of an 800-kilometer highway from Beineu to Sekseuil that he said will connect Chinese border crossings directly to the Caspian ports of Aktau and Kuryk, shortening the China to Europe freight route by 1,000 kilometers and cutting delivery times to three days. ● Kazakhstan's Ministry of Transport says freight along the Trans-Caspian International Transport Route, known as the Middle Corridor, has risen more than fivefold in seven years to 4.5 million tons a year, and expects container traffic to reach 300,000 twenty-foot equivalent units by 2029. ● The prime minister's office said international financial institutions and the Development Bank of Kazakhstan are still running tender procedures for the three road projects, and no total cost has been published by either the government or the presidential press service. Aju Press assembled this from government tender disclosures, which were absent from the launch announcement. ● The European Union has been funding preparatory work on the same road through its 30 million euro Trans-Caspian transport support programme, EU Ambassador Aleška Simkić said in Astana on June 3. 2026-08-06 17:36:16
  • Foreign ministry says NSC coordinates North Korea policy
    Foreign ministry says NSC coordinates North Korea policy SEOUL, August 06 (AJP) - South Korea's Ministry of Foreign Affairs said Thursday that North Korea policy is set through coordination centered on the National Security Council, answering questions about whether it and the Unification Ministry are working from different positions. "The government has consistently pursued policy for the peace process on the Korean Peninsula under close coordination among relevant ministries centered on the National Security Council," spokesperson Park Doo-soon told a regular briefing. The questions followed two days of public exchange between the two ministers. After the foreign, unification, defense and veterans affairs ministries delivered their half-year reports to the president on Wednesday, Foreign Minister Cho Hyun described the Unification Ministry's plan for four-party talks toward a peace regime as idealistic and asked reporters to discount it. Chung Dong-young answered the next morning on his way into Government Complex Seoul in central Seoul: "Ideals are what change reality. I think it helps the government when we cooperate well with each other." Park was also asked about the Unification Ministry's proposal to open public debate on calling North Korea by its official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. "As the president mentioned yesterday, we consider this a matter for careful review among the relevant ministries, taking account of such things as the formation of a national consensus," he said. Asked whether the proposal could affect relations with Washington, Park said security questions between ministries run through the same National Security Council channel. Chung put the naming proposal to President Lee Jae Myung at the presidential Blue House on Wednesday, arguing that calling the other side by its own name is the first step toward the trust that peaceful coexistence requires. Lee urged caution, saying the question was open to dispute and that he had doubts about whether it would help stability on the peninsula. Chung said the president had also encouraged the ministry to keep going. "He said that although it will be hard, like shouting without an echo, we should carry on with the peaceful coexistence policy with patience," Chung said. 2026-08-06 16:45:08
  • KAIST develops technique to recognize objects hidden behind fog
    KAIST develops technique to recognize objects hidden behind fog SEOUL, August 06 (AJP) - A KAIST research team has developed an imaging method that finds a transparent object buried inside fog and works out its shape, thickness and position from a single camera exposure, the university said Thursday. Glass, clear plastic film and living cells are almost invisible to an ordinary camera because they barely change the brightness of the light passing through them. They do change something else. Light slows very slightly as it crosses them, and that shift, called phase, carries the object's outline and its optical thickness. Reading it is how scientists inspect transparent parts in semiconductors and displays, or watch living cells without staining them. The reading breaks down when something scatters the light on the way. Fog, frosted glass and cloudy tissue all send light off in random directions, and when those layers are moving, the scrambling changes moment to moment. Until now the workarounds were to take many exposures of the same target, to measure the scattering environment in advance, or to train a system on large volumes of example images. The team led by Jang Moo-seok, a professor in KAIST's Department of Bio and Brain Engineering, removed all three requirements. Their technique recovers an object sealed between two moving scattering layers, with fog in front of it and fog behind it, from one shot. Two ideas make that possible. The first is where the light goes in. Instead of lighting up the whole front layer, the researchers focus the beam onto a very small spot, the way a magnifying glass concentrates sunlight. Fewer paths through the layer means the light stays organized enough to record the object's phase in the pattern that reaches the camera. The second is where the camera sits. Placed close to the far side of the rear layer, it does not receive a purely random mess. It receives the object's pattern with a consistent smear laid over it, which the team modeled as scattering blur. A random problem became a solvable one. From there the method uses a physical model of how light travels through the object and the fog, paired with artificial intelligence. It does not work the way image AI usually does, by studying thousands of correct answers first. It runs the physics backward from the single measurement, testing what object, what blur and what distance would together produce exactly the pattern the camera saw. All three answers come out at once. The technique held up when the object moved and when the scattering changed, with no calibration and no training data, and in testing it reproduced edges and fine structure more sharply than existing single-shot phase methods. "This is the first demonstration of restoring the shape and position of a transparent object from a single measurement, even in environments where light is severely scattered, such as behind fog or a diffusive film," Jang said. He said the team plans to extend the method to more complex environments, with semiconductor inspection and biomedical imaging as targets. KAIST listed three directions for the work. In manufacturing, it could inspect transparent components sitting under scattering coatings or protective films. In medicine, it could image the retina through a cataract. Applied to reflected rather than transmitted light, it could image objects out of direct line of sight, including for military use. Kim Yoo-sun, a master's student, and Song Gook-ho, a doctoral candidate, were co-first authors, with Jang as corresponding author. The paper appeared in the optics journal Optica on July 20, and the National Research Foundation of Korea funded the work under the Ministry of Science and ICT. 2026-08-06 10:17:14
  • Kookmin students win prize for vehicle solar standard
    Kookmin students win prize for vehicle solar standard SEOUL, August 06 (AJP) - Five undergraduates from Kookmin University's School of Materials Science and Engineering won the grand prize at a national standardization competition on July 24, taking the award given in the name of the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Resources for a proposed durability test covering solar panels built into vehicle bodies. No existing test protocol subjects such panels to light, heat and vibration at the same time, the combination a panel mounted on a moving vehicle meets in service. The team, competing as Hot Potato, submitted a draft evaluation standard that reproduces all three stresses together, and Kookmin said a judging panel drawn from industry and the standards field rated the work the strongest entry. The technology at issue is vehicle-integrated photovoltaics, in which solar cells are fixed to the body of a car or other vehicle and generate electricity while it is being driven. Perovskite is the material widely expected to succeed silicon in solar cells, and it is more fragile under combined environmental stress, which is the problem the students set out to address. The team consisted of Choi Jun-hyuk, Yang Seo-yun, Seo Han-i, Sung Yeon-seung and Han Seon-gu. Their proposal grew out of the department's Engineering Design course, taught by Hong Seung-hyun, who advised the team. The Korean Agency for Technology and Standards and the Korean Standards Association co-hosted the contest at SKY31 Convention in Songpa-gu, Seoul. Ten teams from five universities entered, drawn from Gachon University, Kongju National University, Kookmin, Sejong University and Far East University. Seven of the 10 took prizes across the grand, top excellence, excellence and special categories. Rival entries covered 3D printing construction processes and evaluation criteria for self-healing concrete. Each team was asked to take a technology from its own field of study and work through the process of turning it into a standard. The competition sits inside a government program that trains engineering students to write technical standards rather than only build to them, part of a broader push to place Korean rules at the center of emerging industries. The Ministry of Trade, Industry and Resources (MOTIR) funds the program, and the five universities in the field are the institutions carrying it out. Kookmin has now won the top award at both editions of the contest. Materials science students from the university took the same ministerial grand prize at the first competition, held at the same venue on Nov. 21, 2025, along with awards from the Korean Standards Association and the Korea Institute for Advancement of Technology. The Hot Potato team receives an overseas exchange program as its prize. --- AJP Takeaways ● The Ministry of Trade, Industry and Resources awarded its top prize at the second Advanced Industry Standardization Competition to five Kookmin University materials science undergraduates on July 24 for a draft test standard covering solar panels built into vehicle bodies. ● The Korean Agency for Technology and Standards and the Korean Standards Association drew 10 teams from five universities to the contest, with seven taking prizes. The field and the competing entries, including 3D printing construction processes and self-healing concrete criteria, were not in the university announcement. ● Kookmin has taken the ministerial grand prize at both editions of the contest, having won the first on Nov. 21, 2025. ● The Hot Potato team proposed reproducing light, heat and vibration stress at the same time, a combination no existing protocol applies to perovskite panels mounted on moving vehicles. 2026-08-06 09:56:18
  • Kazakhstan opens AI olympiad as digital push accelerates
    Kazakhstan opens AI olympiad as digital push accelerates SEOUL, August 05 (AJP) - More than 500 high school students from 106 countries began competing in Astana this week at the world's newest international science olympiad, hosted by a government that has spent the past year signing $10 billion in data center agreements and writing Central Asia's first artificial intelligence law. The third International Olympiad in Artificial Intelligence runs through August 8. The second edition, held in Beijing last year, drew 300 students from 61 countries. The first was staged in Burgas, Bulgaria, in 2024. President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev opened the competition on August 3 and used his remarks to link it to a target he set in his address to the nation last year, converting Kazakhstan into a fully digital state within three years. "We are creating a unified innovation ecosystem in which artificial intelligence serves as an important tool for managing the state, the economy, and business, permeating all spheres of public life," Tokayev said. "But this is only the beginning of all processes." He cited Kazakhstan's ranking of 24th out of 193 countries on the United Nations E-Government Development Index, a biennial assessment of how governments deliver services online. That placement comes from the survey published in 2024, built on data collected in 2022 and 2023, and the next edition has not been released. Kazakhstan also sits in the top 10 of the survey's online services measure, alongside South Korea, Denmark and Estonia. Tokayev declared 2026 the Year of Digitalization and Artificial Intelligence. In September 2025, the government created a Ministry of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Development, pulling AI out of a sub-portfolio and giving it cabinet rank. Two months later, he signed a law on artificial intelligence that took force on January 18, making Kazakhstan the first country in Central Asia with a comprehensive AI statute. It sets obligations for developers, owners and users, and hands the ministry authority over a state-run National AI Platform that routes computing power to approved sectors of the economy. The compute came online first. The Alem.Cloud supercomputer in Astana, commissioned in July 2025, runs on 512 Nvidia H200 graphics processors and ranks 86th on the TOP500 list of the world's most powerful machines. It is the largest in the region, and it trains the country's own large language models in Kazakh and Russian. In June, Kazakhstan signed agreements worth $10 billion with Nvidia and the developer Firebird to build a data center campus near Ekibastuz, targeting a cluster of 100,000 graphics processors. Freedom Holding Corp. has separately agreed to develop a $2 billion sovereign AI hub using Nvidia infrastructure. In January, Kazakhstan joined an OpenAI program that supplies 165,000 free ChatGPT Edu licenses to schoolteachers, university faculty and staff at the Astana Hub technology park. The government has set a goal of training one million people in AI skills over five years, covering students, civil servants and the existing workforce. Tokayev framed the agenda as constitutionally anchored. The country's new constitution took effect on July 1, replacing the 1995 document after a referendum in March, and Tokayev said the development course built on innovation is written into it. Kazakhstan votes on August 23 for the Kurultai, the single-chamber parliament that the constitution created. Speakers at the opening ceremony included Kai-Fu Lee, who runs the venture firm Sinovation Ventures and the model developer 01.AI, and Elena Marinova, who chairs the olympiad's international council. Kaspi.kz co-founder Mikhail Lomtadze and Freedom Holding chief executive Timur Turlov also spoke, as did Bagdat Mussin, who heads the Competitive Programming Federation of Kazakhstan and chairs Kazakhtelecom. Tokayev was walked through the competition structure and the tasks students face, and was shown an autonomous robot in operation. Contestants compete in two areas, building AI models and programming autonomous robots, with medals awarded on individual scores across two days of six-hour sessions. He closed by thanking the teachers who prepare the country's competitors. "Last year, at the Artificial Intelligence Olympiad in Beijing, Kazakhstani schoolchildren won three gold, one silver, and three bronze medals," Tokayev said. "This is an achievement of which our country is rightfully proud, and it once again confirms the enormous intellectual and creative potential of our youth." ---- AJP Takeaways ● Kassym-Jomart Tokayev opened the third International Olympiad in Artificial Intelligence in Astana on August 3, where more than 500 students from 106 countries are competing through August 8. He tied the event to his target of turning Kazakhstan into a fully digital state within three years. ● Nvidia and the developer Firebird signed agreements worth $10 billion with Kazakhstan in June to build a data center campus near Ekibastuz, targeting a cluster of 100,000 graphics processors. That deal, along with the July 2025 launch of the Alem.Cloud supercomputer, did not appear in the presidential press release on the olympiad. ● The Ministry of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Development was created in September 2025, and a law on artificial intelligence took force on January 18, making Kazakhstan the first country in Central Asia with a comprehensive AI statute. ● The United Nations ranked Kazakhstan 24th out of 193 countries on its E-Government Development Index, the figure Tokayev cited in his remarks. That placement comes from the survey published in 2024 and built on data collected in 2022 and 2023. 2026-08-05 17:36:58
  • Seoul plans fall push despite North Korea silence
    Seoul plans fall push despite North Korea silence SEOUL, August 05 (AJP) - South Korea will spend the fall looking for a way to talk to North Korea and does not expect to get one, Foreign Minister Cho Hyun said Wednesday, hours after the president told the officials who run the policy that the work will feel like shouting and hearing no echo. Asked whether the two governments might meet face to face at the United Nations General Assembly in September, Cho said the chance remains uncertain and that the North's conduct points one way. "Judging by North Korea's attitude so far, I think it will probably avoid such an opportunity," he said. "But the government is doing everything it can to break the current deadlock, so we will not miss occasions such as the General Assembly, or APEC in the fall." No official channel has opened between the two governments since President Lee Jae Myung took office in June 2025. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in the written report it submitted to the president the same day, lists North Korea's refusal to talk or exchange as the first obstacle to its own Korean Peninsula policy. Cho spoke at a post-briefing session at Government Complex Seoul at 3 p.m., after the ministry delivered its half-year report at the presidential Blue House alongside the ministries handling unification, defense and veterans affairs. The report set out where Seoul has been knocking. Through the first half of the year, the ministry worked with third countries and international bodies to reach Pyongyang, naming Singapore, Viet Nam and Sweden along with the United Nations. It also pressed Beijing on peninsula stability at the January summit and during the prime minister's visit in June, and secured a Security Council sanctions exemption for humanitarian aid to the North. For the second half, it plans to keep working multilateral meetings that North Korea actually attends, including UN settings and unofficial dialogues that mix government officials with academics, while pulling China and Russia toward what it calls a constructive role. The substance on offer is a denuclearization sequence that begins with a freeze. The ministry describes it as halt, then reduce, then dismantle, and says progress on the first step is what it will pursue in talks with Washington. Pyongyang has been moving the other way. It claims status as a nuclear weapons state, continues to build out its nuclear and missile programs, and has drawn closer to Moscow while repairing ties with Beijing, according to the ministry's assessment. It has also widened its own diplomacy, hosting the Vietnamese and Singaporean foreign ministers in May and naming new ambassadors to posts including Indonesia and Sweden, while keeping open the possibility of conditional talks with the United States. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi is expected in Seoul later this month, and Cho said North Korea will be at the front of that conversation. "This is an important issue for settling peace on the Korean Peninsula, so I will take it up with Wang Yi as the top priority," he said. He added that he does not expect Beijing to arrive holding a card it intends to reveal. On reports that North Korea is sending additional troops to Russia, Cho said the matter needs further confirmation and that Seoul is watching closely. "We are looking at how the situation develops with concern, and with a very grave view given the seriousness of this matter," he said. The rest of the report was an accounting of a year the ministry believes went well. Diplomacy ranked first among the areas the public rates positively in the president's performance, according to a Gallup Korea survey released on July 24. A separate evaluation published on June 7 by the Public Policy Evaluation Association and the Segye Times placed national-interest-centered foreign and security policy first among the administration's governing goals. Since the government took office, it has held more than 100 leader-level engagements with over 50 countries, producing roughly 700 follow-up items the ministry is now tracking. Thirty-two foreign ministers had visited South Korea as of July 16. When war broke out in the Middle East, the ministry helped about 1,500 South Koreans get out by land, charter flight, military transport and commercial aircraft, and its missions in the region stayed open through the fighting. Of 26 South Korean vessels caught in the Strait of Hormuz, 24 got clear by July 16. Confinement cases involving South Koreans caught in scam operations in Cambodia fell from 225 in the first half of last year to 14 in the same period this year, a drop of 94 percent, after the ministry adjusted travel advisories, built a standing channel with local police and pushed for the repatriation of suspects. The ministry also ran the first comprehensive survey of grievances from Korean communities abroad, collecting about 2,800 submissions across two rounds through all 173 overseas missions. Of the 1,438 received in the first round, 989 have been resolved. Cho relayed one instruction from the president that came without numbers attached. Lee told the room that foreign policy becoming a target of domestic politics is not desirable, and that it is heading that way regardless. "Rather than any argument, he spoke about practice," Cho said. "My own reading is that it was a remark reflecting deep insight into the fact that diplomacy is reality, and that it happens inside that reality." --- AJP Takeaways ● Foreign Minister Cho Hyun said North Korea will probably avoid a face-to-face opportunity at the United Nations General Assembly in September, while committing to work that occasion and APEC in the fall regardless. ● The Ministry of Foreign Affairs named Singapore, Viet Nam, Sweden and the United Nations as the channels it used to reach Pyongyang in the first half of the year, and listed the North's refusal to talk or exchange as the first obstacle to its own peninsula policy. ● Cho said North Korea will be his top priority when Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi visits Seoul later this month, and that he does not expect Beijing to arrive holding a card it intends to reveal. ● The Ministry of Foreign Affairs disclosed a denuclearization sequence of halt, then reduce, then dismantle, and said it will pursue progress on the first step in talks with Washington. The sequence appears in the written report and slide deck submitted to the president, not in the briefing. 2026-08-05 16:51:17
  • Lee commands Seoul to continue Pyongyang outreach
    Lee commands Seoul to continue Pyongyang outreach SEOUL, August 05 (AJP) - South Korea will keep pursuing peaceful coexistence with North Korea even if Pyongyang refuses to respond, President Lee Jae Myung said Wednesday, likening the government's engagement efforts to "shouting with no echo." Speaking at an expanded government briefing on security, diplomacy, and North Korean issues, Lee acknowledged that officials responsible for inter-Korean affairs had little to show for more than a year of outreach since he took office in June 2025. "You may feel like you are shouting with no echo," Lee told officials from the Ministry of Unification. "There is no response, and sometimes the response that comes is a bad one. But they are next to us regardless." "Even if it is difficult, we have to keep going with a policy of peace and coexistence," he said. The remarks amounted to Lee's clearest public acknowledgment yet that his signature North Korea policy has failed to reopen official dialogue. He framed the stalemate as the product of decades of accumulated hostility rather than a dispute that could be resolved quickly. "We fought a war, and we are also blood relations," he said. "Relations between governments build up over time, the same way relations between people do. You could call it karma. We have lived a long time with hostility, dismissal and confrontation as our strategy, so it is hard to make it better." He warned against abandoning engagement altogether. "If we approach this as 'I go my way and you go yours,' it ends up doing harm to the national community," Lee said. The appeal stands in stark contrast to Pyongyang's increasingly institutionalized rejection of reconciliation. In December 2023, Kim Jong-un abandoned the decades-old concept of eventual reunification, declaring the two Koreas to be separate hostile states rather than one nation temporarily divided. His government dismantled Pyongyang's Arch of Reunification, abolished agencies responsible for inter-Korean affairs and removed references to shared nationhood from official language. That shift became official doctrine at the Workers' Party's Ninth Congress in February, where references to peaceful reunification were removed from the party charter. Kim described South Korea as the country's "most hostile enemy" and said North Korea could destroy it, according to the Korean Central News Agency. Pyongyang has also dismissed Lee's conciliatory gestures as meaningless. In July 2025, Kim Jong-un's sister, Kim Yo-jong, said North Korea had not even assessed the outcome of South Korea's presidential election because the result made no difference. Whatever policy Seoul adopted, she said, there was "no reason to meet and nothing to discuss." She also brushed aside Lee's suspension of anti-North loudspeaker broadcasts and efforts to curb activists sending propaganda leaflets across the border, calling the measures easily reversible. The skepticism reflects three decades of policy reversals in Seoul, where presidents serve a single five-year term and engagement has repeatedly swung with changes in government. Liberal administrations under Kim Dae-jung, Roh Moo-hyun and Moon Jae-in pursued dialogue through summits, the Kaesong Industrial Complex and military confidence-building measures. Conservative governments under Lee Myung-bak, Park Geun-hye and Yoon Suk-yeol dismantled or suspended many of those initiatives following North Korean military provocations and nuclear weapons development. North Korea, meanwhile, has steadily deepened the rupture. It sank the South Korean naval corvette Cheonan in 2010, according to an international investigation that Pyongyang denies, shelled Yeonpyeong Island later that year, demolished the joint inter-Korean liaison office in Kaesong in 2020 and formally scrapped inter-Korean economic cooperation agreements in early 2024. Lee concluded with a warning that North Korea policy itself has become a casualty of South Korea's domestic political cycle. "This gets exploited politically and for partisan gain, so you have to be very careful," he said. "A single word ends up becoming a target in political fights without anyone intending it." Kim offered a similarly dismissive assessment at the Workers' Party Congress in February, calling the conciliatory posture of Lee's government "clumsily deceptive and crude." AJP Takeaways ● Lee Jae Myung told the Ministry of Unification on Wednesday to continue a policy of peace and coexistence with North Korea despite receiving no response from Pyongyang, saying officials may feel they are shouting with no echo. No official channel between the two governments has opened since he took office in June 2025. ● Kim Jong-un wrote the "two hostile states" doctrine into the charter of the Workers' Party of Korea at its Ninth Party Congress in February, removing references to peaceful reunification and calling South Korea the "most hostile enemy," the Korean Central News Agency reported. ● Kim Yo-jong said in a statement carried by North Korean state media in July 2025 that Pyongyang had made no assessment of who won the South Korean election because it made no difference, and that there was no reason to meet and nothing to discuss. She called Seoul's halt to border loudspeaker broadcasts reversible. 2026-08-05 14:05:23