After back-to-back appearances at both weekends of Coachella, David Lee Roth popped out Saturday at Stagecoach to sing Van Halen’s “Jump” with Teddy Swims for the third (and final?) time. To discuss what he called his “three-peat,” I caught up later with the 71-year-old singer, who wore a bedazzled jacket and a leather vest.
Have you bought property in Indio? Do you just live here now? No, I’ve bought property in the American musical fabric that extends beyond time frame, that extends beyond shoes and haircuts. It includes cowboy hats and yarmulkes.
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Next weekend this place is gonna be barren. Will you be back to sing “Jump” with nobody? There’ll be plenty of people here for the Diamond Dave Big Rig Trucking School and Day Care Center.
You’re on your own tour right now. How are those shows going? They go exquisitely because if you enjoy what you saw onstage [tonight], it’s that times 22 songs.
Twenty-two songs in the set. Oh yeah. I wrote every word that I sing, I wrote every note that I sing — all the melodies — and I stacked all the harmonies. Ed [Van Halen], of course, contributed all the great guitar parts. And we wrote all of those parts literally sitting in a tiny little alcove room where you put a washer and a dryer. We would sit knee-to-knee the room was so small, and he’d play the electric guitar. His mom wouldn’t let him plug in because it would be too loud, so I had to lean over. Every song that you know of Van Halen, I heard from an unplugged-in electric guitar from four inches away, going, “Too long.”
Tighten it up. Cut it short. All great musicians finish long after the ending.
Last time we talked, you said you were wearing Artemis II. What’s the outfit tonight? This is classic Nudie’s western wear from Lankershim. This is from the ’50s. This has been all over the world. This is made by Nudie’s of Hollywood, who made all of Roy Rogers’ and Jean Autry’s [clothes] and all of “Bonanza,” “Gunsmoke,” “Rawhide’s” wear. Look up Nudie of Hollywood, OK? This baby’s worth more than my shoes, and they’re custom-made. This jacket’s worth more than my teeth — same thing.
Asset-light companies reshape private credit as lenders embrace intellectual property collateral, despite valuation challenges, legal risks, and AI-driven obsolescence concerns.
Asset-light companies are changing the world of private credit.
Unlike businesses that can rely on a heaping basket of assets like inventory, equipment, and real estate as collateral for private direct lending, these companies tend to use some of the most illiquid and difficult-to-value intellectual property (IP) as collateral.
“Capital is increasingly being formed around asset-based finance [ABF] strategies, but it’s still relatively early innings of where ABF will grow to within private credit markets,” says Brian Armstrong, managing director, US Direct Lending at Benefit Street Partners. “We believe ABF has the potential to be one of the fastest-growing asset classes over the next five years.”
Private-credit assets under management are expected to exceed $2 trillion this year, according to Moody’s 2026 Global Private Credit Outlook, published in January, which predicts they will approach $4 trillion by 2030. “Corporate lending still makes up most of the private credit lending, but momentum is shifting towards ABF,” the authors wrote. “While more difficult to track, ABF has the potential to eclipse the size of more traditional corporate lending.”
Pledging IP for collateral is not new; specialty retailer J. Crew used a mix of IP and other assets as security for more than $540 million payment-in-kind notes about a decade ago. The difficulty in using IP as collateral has been obtaining a fair valuation of assets such as data sets, proprietary software platforms, and patent and trademark portfolios.
Approaches to doing so include discounted cash flow analyses of the asset, benchmarking against comparable transactions, and estimating the asset’s replacement or reproduction costs. Often, businesses rely on an independent third-party valuation firm such as Alvarez & Marsal, Holihan Lokey, or Kroll.
One of the greatest concerns of ABF lenders, however, is the transfer of IP out of the basket of pledged assets.
“In many deals, covenants permit the borrowers to certify in their reasonable commercial discretion what the value of a given asset is,” says Jake Mincemoyer, partner and global co-head of Debt Finance at law firm A&O Shearman. “That’s what has gotten lenders very concerned, given a handful of transactions where borrowers have taken advantage of that and taken a crown-jewel asset out of the collateral package and levered it up elsewhere. So, it’s really been how do we make sure that if we’ve lent against it, we keep it?”
A prime example is the aftermath of J. Crew’s 2017 transfer of pledged IP to a new, unrestricted subsidiary, which was excluded from the parent company’s restrictive covenants and debt limitations and enabled it to raise further capital by pledging the same IP. What has become known as the “J. Crew Maneuver” has led to the inclusion of a “J. Crew Blocker” provision in debt covenants that prevents borrowers from transferring material assets into unrestricted subsidiaries.
That safeguard has not stopped borrowers from executing a variation on the theme, however. In February, Xerox moved IP assets pledged to existing debt to a joint venture in which it owns a 49% stake and raised an additional $450 million in funding. That minority stake prevents the joint venture from being considered a subsidiary under its debt documents, according to Ropes & Gray’s Distressed Debt Legal Insight, published in March.
“Borrowers have found more creative ways to operate within their credit documents, which has driven lenders to be more careful and thoughtful around tightening any unintended flexibility,” Benefit Street’s Armstrong says.
Transatlantic Divide
As in real estate, the ease of obtaining ABF while pledging IP as collateral depends on location. North America is approximately five years ahead of Europe due to EU law regarding governance of intellectual property and its use as collateral.
For example, under the European Parliament and Council’s Directive/24/EC, the original software developer, whether an employee or a consultant, owns the copyright to their code, unless their contract states otherwise. But proving the provenance of software code can be difficult, especially if it contains open-sourced content and third-party APIs.
Steffen Schellschmidt, Clifford Chance
“The market is not fully prepared yet to take on the whole financing of software, given the uncertainties around ownership,” says Steffen Schellschmidt, Munich-based partner and private credit specialist at the law firm Clifford Chance. “You have to do a comprehensive and costly due diligence on this.”
This has led most European private lenders to focus more on registered IP like patents and trademarks, whose ownership is easier to determine.
Secondly, and unlike in the US, EU law does not permit the inclusion of software IP in a floating charge, Schellschmidt notes: “So, once security is perfected under European law, assets can still be transferred, but their value is diminished as they remain subject to the existing pledge.” That creates a funding gap for businesses that fall between early-stage startups and large, successful companies in pharmaceuticals and other knowledge-based industries.
“That is why we don’t have a Silicon Valley,” Schellschmidt contends.
The EU is working to eliminate the funding gap. As part of its Strategic Plan 2030, the European Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) and the European Commission brought together policymakers, IP offices, financial institutions, business leaders, and subject-matter experts in an IP-Backed Finance Steering Group and Technical Working Group on IP Valuation at the end of last year.
The Technical Working Group is mandated to develop an IP Finance Roadmap to “help businesses across Europe, especially startups, scaleups, and SMEs, access finance based on the value of their intellectual property.” The Steering Group will then review the roadmap and shape the EU’s strategic approach to IP valuation and financing, according to EUIPO statements.
AI Speeds IP Obsolescence
AI is affecting ABF, especially at businesses that plan to pledge enterprise software as collateral.
“Whether an asset is tangible or intangible, it will decay over time. Nothing holds all its value forever,” says Mark McMahon, managing director and global practice leader at Alvarez & Marsal Valuation Services. “If it’s a mine, it’s called depletion. If it’s a hard asset, it depreciates. If it’s software or another form of IP, it’s obsolescence.”
Computer code-writing AI engines, such as Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet and Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot, are only shortening the window to obsolescence for existing software stacks and lowering the value of software as collateral as market competition heats up due to lowered barriers to entry.
“The risk associated with a long-term software revenue stream might not necessarily be today what you estimated it to be even half a year ago,” McMahon notes.
However, AI should not be considered the death knell for software’s value as collateral, A&O Shearman’s Mincemoyer says.
“The same way that people figured out how to come up with all kinds of very creative and useful software programs that then they could package as SaaS businesses and really be constructive in the economy, I have to think that AI tools are going to allow even greater advancements and even greater new businesses and new tools as people are using them,” he says. “Does that mean the question is, Will the three or four people running the most powerful AI tools take over everything? There’s a risk of that. Do I think that actually will happen? Probably not.”
That said, the increased speed of software development should lead to more active management of collateral. As Benefit Street’s Armstrong advises: “If your IP collateral could conceivably be directly impacted by AI, you should certainly more frequently review and revalue that collateral to ensure your loan continues to be covered by the value.”
Despite these trends, ABF lenders’ appetite to accept various types of IP as collateral is growing. “Over the last five to 10 years, I have seen a large increase in financing being done where lenders are comfortable lending on nontangible assets,” Mincemoyer says.
Dylan Sprouse sprang to action early Friday morning when he encountered a trespasser at his Hollywood Hills home.
Sources familiar with the incident told The Times that “The Suite Life of Zack & Cody” star tackled a man on the lawn near his home after his wife, Victoria’s Secret model Barbara Palvin, spotted “the creepy guy.” Palvin made an emergency call to police around 12:30 a.m. and reported a possible burglary.
TMZ, citing unnamed sources, reported that Sprouse had a gun and held the trespasser down until police arrived.
Police told The Times that the suspect was taken in on outstanding warrants and that no injuries were reported. Additionally, the suspect did not make it inside the couple’s 1920s Spanish-style home, only onto the property.
TMZ obtained footage of the arrest, which showed a suspect, whose face was blurred out, being handcuffed outside a police vehicle. A skateboard was leaned against the fence of the Disney alum’s property, and a “Private Property, No Trespassing” sign was posted on the gate.
Representatives for Sprouse and Palvin have not responded to The Times’ request for comment.
The couple met at a party in 2017 and by the fall of 2018, Palvin was gushing to Vogue that she was “very much in love.”
“I feel like I found the perfect guy,” she said of Sprouse. “He’s very kind and gentle.”
The couple tied the knot in the summer of 2023. In 2024, Palvin walked in the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show and during a backstage interview said that Sprouse always has something up his sleeve to surprise her.
Outside the show, Sprouse revealed on the pink carpet that he had signs made with the faces of the couple’s fur babies, a French bulldog named Piggy Cow and a cat named Klaus Von Sprouse, to hold up while Palvin strutted the catwalk.
Hui Ka Yan, the founder and former chair of troubled Chinese property giant, Evergrande Group, pleaded guilty to a slew of charges on Tuesday in a showcase trial in the southern province of Guangdong. File photo by Wu Hong/EPA
April 14 (UPI) — The founder and former chairman of Chinese property giant China Evergrande Group pleaded guilty Tuesday to a slew of charges, including embezzlement, securities fraud and corporate graft at a trial in the southern city of Shenzhen.
Hui Ka Yan admitted “illegally absorbing public deposits” where buyers’ down payments on apartments off-plan were used to fund hundreds of other projects in the case in which Evergrande Real Estate Group also faced a similar set of charges, the Intermediate People’s Court of Shenzhen said in a statement online.
Evergrande took in millions of dollars from buyers that, instead of being used to complete the properties they were purchasing, were diverted to new developments, the court heard.
Hui also admitted fundraising fraud, illegal issuance of loans and unauthorized disclosure of “important information” during the high-profile two-day trial, which was attended by deputies from the National People’s Congress, the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference of which he was once a standing committee member, and investors.
The court statement said China Evergrande Group and Evergrande Real Estate Group were also indicted on charges of illegally collecting public deposits, fundraising fraud, illegal issuance of loans and fraudulent issuance of securities.
The downfall of the business tycoon, once Asia’s richest with a net worth of more than $42 billion, began in 2021 when the property empire he founded 25 years earlier collapsed after a massive Chinese property bubble burst, leaving 1,300 half-finished Evergrande developments financed with $300 billion of debt.
Hui was placed under house arrest in September 2023, prompting the suspension of trading in Evergrande shares by market regulators across the border in Hong Kong, only a month after trading had resumed following a 17-month suspension.
The company was also the subject of a winding-up petition in a Hong Kong court brought by creditors and had sought protection from being made bankrupt in the United States in a New York court the previous month.
Hong Kong regulators initially suspended Evergrande for failing to issue financial results for two years. When it did report in July 2023, it said it had lost $81.1 billion total in 2021 and 2022, mostly through payments to suppliers and lenders, as it battled to finish thousands of housing projects across 280 Chinese cities.
In January 2024, after repeated reprieves to allow it time to come up with a viable plan to restructure liabilities that had by then grown to at least $325 billion, the court in Hong Kong placed Evergrande into liquidation.
Hui was handed a $6.5 million fine in March 2024 for Evergrande, stating in its results that revenue was $78 billion more than it actually was and was handed a lifetime ban from participating in China’s capital market.
The final blow came in August 2025 with the delisting by regulators of Evergrande shares from the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, almost 16 years to the day after it was the most oversubscribed IPO of 2009 with a valuation in excess of $50 billion.
The ban was imposed after an 18-month deadline for Evergrande stock to resume trading passed the previous month, with the company opting not to appeal the decision.
Hui had led a 15-year drive to grow Evergrande into one of China’s largest businesses, spending billions expanding into tourism and recreation, healthcare, finance, EV manufacturing and infrastructure, entertainment and agribusiness.
In 2020, it began work on a new $1.7 billion, 100,000-seat stadium for Guangzhou FC, the soccer club it had purchased 10 years earlier.
However, the company’s growth was delivered through massive borrowing, much of it highly leveraged, with the result that six years on the stadium, like many of Evergrande’s projects, it remains incomplete after it was seized by the government in November 2021.
Children race to push colored eggs across the grass during the annual Easter Egg Roll event on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington on April 21, 2025. Easter this year takes place on April 5. Photo by Samuel Corum/UPI | License Photo
One of L.A.’s most unique art galleries is closing up shop.
Gallery 1988, which opened in 2004 and proclaimed itself “the first pop culture-focused art gallery in the world,” will cease operations at the end of April. In a post on Instagram, gallery owner Katie Sutton said that while the gallery had been forced to close its physical space on Melrose a few years back, she had “really tried to keep things going [online], especially for our amazing artists.” Unfortunately, she wrote, “the [art] market is the worst I’ve seen it in over two decades,” and the decision to close became inevitable.
A launching pad for artists whose work paid tribute to television, film, video games and more, Gallery 1988 was renowned for shows like the annual “Crazy 4 Cult,” which showcased pieces celebrating underground classics from across the entertainment space. It also specialized in single-focus shows like “Weird Al,” which celebrated the career of the oddball recording artist “Weird Al” Yankovic, and “You’re the Very Best, Like No One Ever Was,” which paid tribute to the world of Pokémon.
Exhibitions at Gallery 1988, which is closing after 20 years, often featured lines around the block, with fans who camped out for a chance to score a prized piece.
(Courtesy of Gallery 1988)
Perhaps most famously, the gallery collaborated with studios to create art-focused campaigns around properties such as “The Avengers” and “Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” while also launching solo shows from artists like Scott C, Luke Chueh and Tom Whalen.
Gallery 1988 was renowned for selling work that ranged in price from $10 into the thousands, enabling customers from around the world to buy pieces that spoke to them, whether a postcard-sized digital print or a large oil-on-canvas painting.
A number of other galleries have closed in recent months across Los Angeles, including Blum, Nino Mier Gallery, Clearing, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery and L.A. Louver. Sutton says that she’s heard through the gallery grapevine that “even galleries that haven’t closed are struggling,” adding that “it’s a hard time for everybody.”
Though there’s never one reason a business closes, some industry observers and art fans have cited the rise in AI-generated content potentially devaluing original art overall. It’s especially true in the pop culture space, with consumer activity down not just at places like Gallery 1988 but also at events such as WonderCon in Anaheim, where artists could often expect to make a good chunk of change.
Jensen Karp, who co-founded Gallery 1988 with Sutton but stepped back after a health scare nearly two years ago, says that while he certainly sees a “malaise in culture because of AI” that’s indicative of the population “losing the understanding of what true art is,” he wouldn’t attribute the collapse of Gallery 1988 solely to that one thing.
Kristin Tercek “Rejoice” 2015 for the “Force Awakens” show with Disney, LucasFilm and Unicef at Gallery 1988.
“Our customer base was the people who looked up release dates and who went to the Arclight, and that sense of community is just not there anymore post-pandemic,” Karp says. With the entertainment industry struggling in L.A. as well, that means less disposable income floating around for things like art — especially from the kinds of people who might be inclined to buy a portrait of, say, Steve Martin in the movie “The Jerk.”
Greg Simkins, a California based artist who often sold through Gallery 1988 under the name “CRAOLA,” says he’s felt the impact of the entertainment industry’s contraction firsthand. “People like directors, producers and actors were some of our biggest clients,” Simkins says. “All of the sudden they’re leaving, going to places like Atlanta and Canada. AI is screwing up the movie industry too, and those are the kinds of people who had expendable money to buy original art so it trickles down.”
It doesn’t help that there’s more pop culture-centered art floating around now, and not just on sites like Instagram and Etsy. Though Gallery 1988 was a frontrunner in celebrating popular culture through art when it opened, even hosting a “Rick and Morty”-themed show before the Adult Swim series had a lick of merchandise, it also became a proof of concept for companies including Disney and Netflix, which have started selling their own artist-created material inspired by their properties.
And with Hollywood releasing fewer movies into theaters, the base of what Gallery 1988 artists could pay tribute to also began to contract. Frequent gallery contributor Whalen says that when Gallery 1988 opened, it was filling a niche and “creating fresh content for movies that spoke to” people in their 20s and 30s. Over time, though, art that celebrated properties like “Ghostbusters,” “Back to the Future” and “The Goonies” started to overwhelm the market, causing “a lot of the 1970s and ‘80s movies to become stale,” Whalen says.
Scott C’s “Breaking Bad Upon the Mount,” 2012, for the “Breaking Bad Art Project: With Sony and Vince Gilligan” at Gallery 1988.
While Sutton and Karp both say they’re beyond grateful that they got to open Gallery 1988 in the first place, let alone keep it open for more than 20 years, they’re worried about what closing the gallery will mean to some of their contributing artists.
“There are so many incredible artists out there and there are so many more places for them to show their work now and that’s amazing,” Sutton says. “But with that bombardment of media from everywhere, it’s hard to really see stuff because it’s coming at you from all directions. So many artists are out there trying to make a living and support their families and that’s just becoming harder and harder.”
“So many of the artists we showed never expected to have an art gallery email them,” Karp says. “I’m so proud of all the artists we worked with and what we were able to do, but I also know that [Gallery 1988 shutting down] closes up an avenue for all of them too and that sucks.”
A five-year grassroots campaign to spur the reopening of one of the crown jewels of moviegoing in Los Angeles is on indefinite pause following an incident at the theater Friday night.
Ben Steinberg, a 26-year-old film student at Cal State Northridge, has long been a vocal and active proponent of reopening Hollywood’s Cinerama Dome, which has been closed since the onset of the pandemic in March 2020. A Change.org petition started by Steinberg has more than 31,000 signatures asking the Decurion Corp., longtime owners of the venue, to reopen or lease the property to someone else who would. Across social media platforms, Steinberg has nearly 12,000 followers.
From across Sunset Boulevard on Friday night, Steinberg — along with a projectionist and a privately-hired security guard — had been projecting images of two members of the Forman family, who own Decurion, onto the front of the Dome along with the slogan “Mr. Forman REOPEN THE DOME!” After about two-and-a-half hours, LAPD officers arrived in response to a radio call received around 9 p.m.
“They came to us and they informed us that the property owner considers it harassment and that it’s an escalation and that we have to shut down,” said Steinberg in an interview with The Times on Sunday afternoon. “So we just shut down immediately. We didn’t contest anything.”
There was no immediate response to a request for comment from Decurion on Monday. The LAPD confirmed details of the incident.
The Cinerama Dome originally opened in 1963 with its white tiled design and distinctive marquee. In April 2021 it was announced by Pacific Theatres that the venue would not be reopening. That brief statement regarding the closure of Pacific Theatres and ArcLight Cinemas, which operated the Dome and were also owned by Decurion, said in part, “This was not the outcome anyone wanted, but despite a huge effort that exhausted all potential options, the company does not have a viable way forward.”
Since then there have been sporadic signs of life regarding the venue, mostly to do with liquor licensing and permit requests, such as last October when a company called Dome Center LLC filed an application for a conditional-use permit.
Particularly since it became part of the larger ArcLight Hollywood multiplex in 2002, the Dome had been a vital part of the community of moviegoers in Los Angeles, home to many notable premieres and events. The front of the theater made a memorable appearance in Quentin Tarantino’s Oscar-winning 2019 film “Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood.”
For now Steinberg considers his Save the Cinerama Dome campaign, which began in April 2021, paused but he hopes to resume it as soon as possible. The complaint made to the police Friday was the first reaction of any kind Steinberg has received from Decurion.
“I think it definitely tells what their intentions are,” said Steinberg. “This is the only sign that they’ve given us that they don’t want us to continue and it’s definitely a threat.”
For Steinberg, the campaign has grown beyond just wanting to see movies again in a favorite venue and into something about who truly owns the cultural capital of the city.
“I think it’s extremely important to the community of Los Angeles and it represents the city,” said Steinberg of the Cinerama Dome. “And just personally, I have so many good memories of the theater. I would hope that I’d be able to go back in again and watch movies. I think the whole city deserves the movie theater. I don’t think it would be fair for them to keep it abandoned.”
While Decurion may be operating within its rights as owner of the property, its secretive and mysterious business practices have increasingly angered film fans concerned about the future of moviegoing in the city.
“When I first posted about it, I thought people wouldn’t care,” said Steinberg. “But it seems like the whole world cares about the Cinerama Dome. And I think too it’s more than the Cinerama Dome at this point. I think it just kind of represents the overall landscape of L.A. and America and how these large corporations can own historic buildings and keep them abandoned and then sort of push away people who want [them] to reopen.”
This seaside hotel is arguably one of the most famous in the UK, and it overlooks the city’s long shingle beach and lively promenade, as well as being just steps from the easily-recognised pier
The hotel overlooks a famous beach with classic seaside vibes(Image: Adam Gerrard / Daily Mirror)
A weekend at a seaside hotel is a classic British staycation. From windswept walks on the promenade to fish and chips on the beach, it’s fun no matter what the weather.
Seaside accommodation can vary massively from independent B&Bs to chains, and a recent article by Which? uncovered some of its inspectors’ favorite seaside hotels from across the UK, with properties from Fife to Kent making the list.
However, clinching the number one spot is a five-star property that overlooks the famous Brighton Beach. The Grand is over 155-years old, and has had a complete refurb in recent years, restoring much of the former glory to this long-running hotel.
Even among Brighton’s long promenade which hosts many huge hotels, the Grand stands out as a landmark of the city. Its marble columns and iron balconies harking back to when Brighton was a stylish seaside destination for Victorians.
The hotel has over 200 rooms, from simple doubles with comfy beds to grand sea-view suites, and each room has suitably nautical colors and touches that will get you in the mood for seaside fun.
Downstairs, guests can relax in the thermal suite with a hydrotherapy pool, jacuzzi, and steam room, or can book a spa treatment such as a facial or massage, the perfect end to a long day exploring the city. It also has a stylish restaurant overlooking the seafront, where you can enjoy a classic afternoon tea or a dinner menu featuring freshly caught seafood.
Staying at the Grand means you’re just a short stroll from many of Brighton’s attractions. Brighton Palace Pier is a must-see. Dating back to 1899, it’s another example of Brighton’s ornate Victorian architecture, and you can enjoy amusements, fairground rides, bars, and colourful end-of-the-pier shows.
Explore the Royal Pavilion and gardens, a unique Regency-era palace inspired by Indian architecture. This ornate building is often compared to the Taj Mahal on the outside thanks to its dramatic domes and minarets. A newer addition to the skyline is the Brighton i360, an observation tower that gently lifts visitors 138-metres into the sky. Walk around the glass viewing pod and you can enjoy sea views on one side and the city and the South Downs on the other.
Holidaymakers bringing kids along, or just those who love seeing colourful creatures, will enjoy SEA LIFE Brighton. It’s the world’s oldest continuously-running aquarium, having been open since 1872, and includes the classic glass tunnel for spotting sea animals up close.
The Lanes and North Laine are also must-visit areas when you spend a weekend in Brighton. North Laine is full of colourful independent shops offering vintage clothes, unique household items, and artworks, while The Lanes include boutique shops, stylish cafés and upmarket restaurants. As the name implies, these are found down narrow, pedestrianised streets where you can wander for hours and find the city’s hidden gems.
Have a story you want to share? Email us at webtravel@reachplc.com
South Korea’s Ministry of Intellectual Property has appointed former Go champion Lee Sedol as its first ambassador. Photo by Ministry of Intellectual Property
SEOUL, March 16 (UPI) — South Korea’s Ministry of Intellectual Property has appointed former Go champion Lee Sedol as its first ambassador, 10 years after his landmark competition with AlphaGo.
The ministry said Friday that the appointment would help it communicate its policy direction to the public in a more symbolic and accessible way.
A few years after the 2016 contest against AlphaGo, Lee retired from the strategic board game that is popular in Korea, Japan, and China. He is now a special professor at the country’s Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology.
Back then, AlphaGo ultimately beat Lee in the five-game series. However, Lee managed to secure a historic victory in the fourth game.
“Professor Lee is recorded as the first and also the last human to defeat AI,” Intellectual Property Minister Kim Young-sun said at the event.
“Regardless of the outcome of his match against AI, I believe that he demonstrated a desirable model for the AI era — not viewing AI merely as something to overcome or challenge, but as a partner with which we can cooperate and coexist,” he said.
Lee promised to support the ministry, the country’s government organization responsible for policies related to patents trademarks, and other intellectual property rights.
“Ten years ago, there was the match against AlphaGo. I think that may have been the starting point of AI. Now it has become difficult to imagine a world without AI,” Lee said.
“In line with these changes, I believe that an important task for the MOIP is how well it collaborates and adapts to this environment to continue developing and advancing,”
