OpenAI CEO Sam Altman (샘 알트먼) will visit South Korea on June 14 and depart on the evening of June 15 on a 2-day trip, making sequential visits to Samsung Electronics, Kakao and Naver. It will be about 8 months since his last visit in October.

Industry sources said on June 11 that Altman will visit Samsung Electronics' Digital City in Suwon, Gyeonggi Province, on June 15 and hold a "DX Insight Talk" event with employees of its DX division.

The event was arranged after Samsung Electronics' DX division officially introduced external generative AI services such as ChatGPT, Gemini Enterprise and Claude for internal use. Altman is expected to give a lecture on changes that advances in AI technology will bring and the direction of AI-based work innovation, and to exchange views with employees.

Samsung Electronics said in an internal notice, "In an era of working with AI, we will discuss future changes that AI technology will create and AI-based work innovation with Altman, a global AI leader at the center of that transformation." Industry sources said ChatGPT has the broadest adoption among the three AI tools introduced by the DX division and is known to be used by all of its employees worldwide.

Altman will also visit Kakao's Pangyo Agit in Seongnam, Gyeonggi Province, at 9 a.m. the same day to 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 centered on integrating ChatGPT into Kakao's major services, and launched "ChatGPT for Kakao" in October that year. The meeting is expected to focus on ways to strengthen linkage between KakaoTalk's conversation context and ChatGPT, industry sources said. It will be their first official face-to-face meeting in 1 year and 4 months since the strategic partnership announcement in February last year.

Altman is also expected to visit Naver's second headquarters, 1784. Naver officially confirmed the visit but said the exact time has not been decided. The visit is expected to be an initial meeting to explore whether there are cooperation measures between the two companies, industry sources said. It follows Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's visit to Naver 1784 on June 8, when he announced plans for infrastructure cooperation including building a gigawatt-scale AI factory, and now Altman will also visit the same building. Naver has its own large language model, HyperCLOVA X, as well as cloud and data center infrastructure.

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. At the time, Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix agreed to supply high-performance, low-power memory to OpenAI's "Stargate" project to build large-scale AI data centers in the United States with Oracle and SoftBank over four years with an investment of $500 billion, about 726 trillion won.

Attention is focused on whether those partnerships will be made more concrete on the back of this visit. Lee is currently on a business trip to Europe and Chey is unable to match schedules, and separate meetings with both chairmen are not expected this time, industry sources said.