From Learning AI to Building It: Government Tests a ‘National AI Development’ Drive
IT DAILY ·
✦ AI Summary
The government is shifting from education and hands-on experience to a stage where citizens directly build AI services.
The Ministry of Science and ICT and NIA will hold the "Everyone's AI Lab AI Service Competition," supporting any citizen aged 15 or older to develop ideas into services.
The contest will proceed through preliminaries, finals, coaching, and mentoring, and with total prize money of KRW 26 million, outstanding services will be linked to startup and commercialization efforts.
The government is expanding its policy to spread artificial intelligence (AI) across the general public, shifting from education and hands-on experience to a stage where citizens directly build AI services. It aims to support nonexpert developers so they can use natural language-based vibe coding, cloud tools, and data, while helping them develop AI services that solve everyday and community problems.
As part of that effort, the Ministry of Science and ICT and the National Information Society Agency (NIA) announced on the 18th that they will hold the "Everyone's AI Lab AI Service Competition." The purpose of the contest is to let citizens directly turn their ideas into AI services.
This competition is part of the "Everyone's AI Growth Ladder Project," launched on the 3rd. The core of the project is to move beyond AI learning and use, and instead enable citizens to develop services themselves.
In addition, the project focuses on connecting promising outputs to demonstrations and linking promising outputs to startup and commercialization efforts. This competition also creates a pipeline from development results to demonstration and startup commercialization.
The contest will use the "Everyone's AI Lab online platform" to propose ideas for solving personal, local, and social issues and to develop AI services. Any citizen aged 15 or older can participate, either individually or in teams of up to 4 people. The recruitment period runs from the 18th to the 6th of next month.
A key feature of the project is that it does not stop at collecting ideas, but provides an actual AI service development environment. Participants can use AI tokens, private cloud services, and AI development support tools provided by "Everyone's AI Lab," and they will also be given access to about 99,000 public and private data sets across different fields and about 13,000 APIs.
In particular, it supports natural language-based vibe coding so that users with relatively little programming expertise can use AI assistance to turn ideas into real services. Through this, the government seeks to lower the barrier to entry for development.
In line with the policy push to become "the country that uses AI best in the world," the government is shifting the focus of its AI adoption drive from expanding the number of people educated in AI to enabling ordinary citizens to directly build services that use AI. This reflects a policy shift from simply increasing the number of AI learners to having ordinary citizens directly create AI-powered services.
Since the emergence of generative AI, development environments that allow code to be written and edited in natural language have spread, lowering the barrier to entry for software development. This project is an attempt to apply that changed development environment to the government’s AI policy for the general public.
The key task of the project is to move vibe-coding outputs from ideas to services that can actually be used. Accordingly, the government designed the contest so it would not end with a one-off idea submission, and the contest structure is laid out as idea, development, demonstration, and commercialization.
The process begins with registration and submission of an AI service concept paper, followed by a written evaluation. The competition will involve 50 teams, with 10 teams selected. The preliminary round will be held across 5 regions nationwide, and the final round will follow with a launch ceremony for the advancing teams.
The selected teams will receive two months of support from company experts. During the support period, they will get expert coaching, mentoring, and service refinement, and the process will conclude with final presentations and awards.
Submitted concept papers will be evaluated based on problem definition, necessity of the proposal, creativity, appropriateness of AI use, feasibility, and completeness. Based on this, 10 teams from each of the 5 regions, or 50 teams in total, will be selected to advance to the preliminaries. The regions are divided into the Seoul metropolitan area, Gangwon region, Chungcheong region, Gyeongsang region, and Jeolla and Jeju region.
Regional preliminaries will be held sequentially at "Everyone's AI Lounge," an offline development and demonstration hub. The schedule is Gyeongsang region on September 15, Jeolla and Jeju region on the 16th, Seoul metropolitan area on the 17th, Chungcheong region on the 18th, and Gangwon region on the 22nd. At each regional preliminary, the top 2 teams will advance to the final round, bringing the total number of finalists to 10 teams.
Teams that reach the final round will receive additional support beyond the prize competition. Coaching and mentoring will run for about two months, from October 2 to December 1, and will be provided by experts from major domestic AI and IT companies.
The purpose of the support during this period is to further develop idea-level outputs into AI services that can actually be used. Additional support items include data, APIs, vibe coding tokens, cloud resources, and development support tools.
The competition carries total prize money of KRW 26 million. The grand prize winner, one team, will receive the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Science and ICT Award along with KRW 10 million. One team will receive the NIA president’s award and KRW 5 million for the top prize, two teams will each receive KRW 2.5 million for excellence awards, and 6 teams will each receive KRW 1 million as encouragement awards.
After the awards, the government plans to link outstanding services to startup and commercialization efforts. Under the design of the "Everyone's AI Growth Ladder," the program is structured to connect AI education, service development, expansion and sharing of outstanding services, and youth startups and commercialization. Using government-provided cloud and AI development tools can lower the development threshold at the prototype stage.
The criteria for judging the competition’s success will be the scale of actual service creation and the number of services that survive commercialization, rather than the number of participants or winners. Operating real services requires ongoing computing costs, data acquisition, security, personal data protection, and business model solutions, which are identified as necessary tasks.
As the competition expands its target audience to include ordinary citizens who are not AI specialists, a follow-up support system for maintaining and improving services after the contest is expected to be important.
In this regard, Lee Do-gyu, director of information and communications policy at the Ministry of Science and ICT, emphasized making AI usage capabilities a basic competency for all citizens and a core element of future competitiveness, and said it is important to expand opportunities for the public to learn AI. He also said it is important to expand opportunities for citizens to directly turn ideas into services.
Source: IT DAILY · Lee Jae-young
Original: https://www.itdaily.kr/news/articleView.html?idxno=241049
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Source: IT DAILY
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