AI Summer Night Rave

What was discussed

The first session opened with An Jae-man, CEO of VESSL AI. Behind him was a track record: electrical engineering and mathematics at KAIST, then infrastructure work at Watcha and Cookie Run, where he lived through scaling from 10 million users to 100 million. What pushed him to start a company was, unexpectedly, personal. After his mother was diagnosed with cancer, he said, he turned toward solving medical problems with AI.

What VESSL AI does is lower the barrier to AI infrastructure. GPUs that used to require year-long contracts worth hundreds of millions of won were broken down into seconds and hours, so researchers use only as much as they need. An summed it up by saying GPUs are the real moat. The more GPUs you secure, the better the models you can build, and that turns directly into competitiveness and business results.

He also offered a read on Korea's opportunity. With HBM supply as the bottleneck, and given where Korea stands in semiconductors, he expects a substantial share of the world's GPU volume could be pulled into the country within two years, making Korea a global GPU hub.

The second session went to Ko Min-sung of Takitani Lab. He runs an Instagram account where more than 70% of his 33,000 followers are overseas, in the US, Germany, France, Spain and beyond. His best-known work is built on the premise that "a man from the Joseon era is a DJ." By refining a workflow of generating images, turning them into video, and then adding music, he said he cut a single 15-second video from six hours of work down to two.

His approach to the work is to not chase trends. He builds the idea first and picks up the technology afterward. Asked about the common belief that AI-made content has no originality, he answered that originality comes from unexpected combinations. Nowhere else, he said, will you find a man from Joseon DJing in a place full of dinosaurs.

The event itself did not go entirely smoothly. The rain that threatened the outdoor setup eased into a drizzle partway through, the finger food ran out faster than expected, and the team went out mid-event and bought another million won worth of pizza. When the sound came up, a noise complaint brought the police by. With Kim Tae-hyun of Meta Comedy doing AI stand-up and the Takitani Lab DJ team carrying the sound into the night, it closed out as a gathering that erased the line between seminar and party.