OpenAI CEO Sam Altman (샘 알트먼) will visit South Korea on June 14 and leave on the evening of June 15, visiting Samsung Electronics and Kakao in succession on a one-night, two-day trip. It will be his first visit since October last year, about 8 months ago.

Industry sources said on Wednesday that Altman will visit South Korea on June 14 and go the next day to Samsung Electronics' Digital City in Suwon, south of Seoul, to hold a "DX Insight Talk" event with employees of the DX division.

The event was arranged after Samsung Electronics recently officially introduced external generative AI services in-house, including ChatGPT, Gemini Enterprise and Claude. Altman is set to deliver a talk on changes AI technology advances could bring to the workplace and the direction of AI-based work innovation, and to exchange views with employees.

Samsung Electronics is pushing an AI transformation, or AX, to boost execution capabilities and work productivity across the organisation by adopting external generative AI. Industry sources said that among the three AI services adopted by the DX division, ChatGPT has the broadest scope of use and is used by all DX division employees worldwide.

After finishing his schedule at Samsung Electronics, Altman will visit Kakao's Pangyo headquarters and meet CEO Jeong Shin-a (정신아). Kakao said, "This meeting is to discuss additional cooperation measures between the two companies, and we will share specific discussion items after the June 15 meeting."

OpenAI and Kakao signed a strategic partnership in February last year centred on combining ChatGPT with Kakao’s major services. The meeting is expected to focus on ways to strengthen connectivity between KakaoTalk’s conversation context and ChatGPT, industry sources said.

Altman, during his visit to South Korea in October last year, held a series of meetings with Samsung Electronics Chairman Lee Jae-yong (이재용) and SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won (최태원) and built strategic partnerships with each of them.

At the time, the two sides agreed to supply high-performance, low-power memory to the "Stargate" project, in which OpenAI, together with Oracle and SoftBank, will invest $500 billion over four years to build large-scale AI data centres in the United States.

Attention is focused on whether those partnerships will be made more concrete through this visit. Lee is currently on a business trip to Europe, and a separate meeting is unlikely this time because Altman and Chey have conflicting schedules, industry sources said.