1 of 3 | Chung Shin-a (L), CEO of South Korean tech giant Kakao Corp., shakes hands with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman during a press conference in Seoul Tuesday. Kakao announced a partnership with OpenAI to use ChatGPT in its services, joining a global alliance led by the U.S. AI company amid intensifying competition in the global AI market. Photo by Yonhap/EPA-EFE
SEOUL, Feb. 4 (UPI) — OpenAI chairman Sam Altman inked a deal with South Korean tech giant Kakao Corp. on Tuesday, marking the second major Asian partnership for the Silicon Valley ChatGPT maker this week amid intensifying AI competition sparked by China’s new DeepSeek model.
Kakao, which operates South Korea’s most widely used messaging app, announced the partnership at a press event in Seoul.
“We will lead the popularization of AI services by collaborating with OpenAI, which has global technological competitiveness, to provide innovative customer experiences,” Kakao CEO Chung Shin-a said alongside Altman.
“Through this collaboration, Kakao will further advance its orchestration strategy and mark a turning point in Kakao’s efforts to bring the future closer,” Chung said.
The two companies will work to integrate OpenAI technology into Kakao’s digital ecosystem, including its KakaoTalk chat service and its forthcoming AI-powered personal agent Kanana. They will also develop joint AI products.
In addition to messaging, Kakao operates a wide range of services and products from banking and payments to gaming and taxi-hailing — a market dominance that has led to scrutiny and fines from the government’s antitrust regulators.
“Kakao has a deep understanding of how technology can enrich everyday lives, and they’ve consistently delivered innovative experiences for their users,” Altman said at the press event. “We’re excited to bring advanced AI to Kakao’s millions of users and work together to integrate our technology into services that transform how Kakao’s users communicate and connect.”
The partnership comes on the heels of OpenAI’s $3 billion deal with Japan’s SoftBank, announced Monday, as the company looks to bolster alliances in an AI marketplace that has been rattled by the surprise emergence of Chinese competitor DeepSeek.
The Hangzhou-based startup sent shockwaves across the industry when it released its free R1 chatbot last month. The open-source large-language model performs comparably to OpenAI’s latest o1 model but was developed at a fraction of the cost and requires far less computing power.
DeepSeek’s emergence sparked a sell-off of semiconductor and tech sector stocks last Monday, with leading AI chipmaker Nvidia shedding nearly $600 billion in market capitalization on the Nasdaq composite index.
Following the Kakao event Tuesday, Altman sat down with Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son and Samsung Electronic chairman Lee Jae-yong at a Samsung office in Seoul. Son told local reporters that the Stargate AI infrastructure project in the United States was discussed.
OpenAI and Softbank are among the leaders of the Stargate project, a $500 billion AI initiative announced by U.S. President Donald Trump last month.
Altman also met with SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won, whose conglomerate includes memory chip giant SK Hynix, one of the main suppliers to Nvidia.