[What's Up Silicon Valley] Where Does Innovation Come From?

In the snowy winter night of Paris, France in 2008. Two young people who visited Paris to attend a tech conference were stomping their feet. It was difficult to catch a taxi in Paris on a snowy night. These two young men had a bright idea in the heart of snowy Paris. They imagined a service to call a taxi with just a mobile phone. The following year, in 2009, in San Francisco, USA, these two young men, Travis Kalanick and Garrett Camp, founded the global ride-sharing company Uber. Sixteen years after Uber was founded, it is hard to find taxis in major US cities like New York or San Francisco. Much has happened since, but Uber has replaced taxis. Eventually, a competitor called Lyft emerged and is competing with Uber.

In the fall of 2022, OpenAI unveiled a conversational AI search called ChatGPT to the world. Members of OpenAI believed that the search service needed to change, even though there was the world's top company, Google, which seemed insurmountable. OpenAI executed this by launching ChatGPT, which provides precise and concise answers instead of multiple links. The global response to ChatGPT was explosive. It surpassed 1 million users within 5 days of launch. Within 2 months of launch, 100 million people used ChatGPT. The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) evaluated it as an AI challenger threatening Google. The New York Times (NYT) also described ChatGPT as the 'iPhone of AI'.

As OpenAI's ChatGPT swept the world, Google's original AI powerhouse declared a code red, meaning an emergency, and responded. Google, which dominated more than 90% of the global search market, was determined. Google responded by unveiling the conversational AI chatbot 'Bard' in February 2023, right after ChatGPT appeared. Bard was reborn as the latest AI model, Gemini, through several upgrades. On the 21st (local time), Google showcased a surprising conversational search AI mode at its annual developer conference held at its headquarters in Mountain View, California, USA. Through fair competition with OpenAI, it launched an upgraded search service.

Waymo's unmanned (robo) taxi vehicle, a subsidiary of Google's autonomous driving division. The sight of robo-taxis equipped with sensors like LiDAR and radar, which are the eyes of autonomous vehicles, driving around downtown San Francisco is no longer unfamiliar. Waymo's robo-taxis are now visible throughout Silicon Valley. There is a company that has thrown down the gauntlet. It is Zoox, a global commerce company Amazon's subsidiary. Amazon's Zoox, which looks like a bread toaster, is accelerating innovation in the US autonomous vehicle market by competing with Waymo's robo-taxis. Elon Musk's Tesla has also entered the autonomous vehicle market. Musk is poised to create innovation and compete with Waymo and Zoox through autonomous vehicles called 'Cybercab'.

What about the situation in Korea? It seems that Korea's leading IT companies are trying various things. However, it seems difficult to find anything innovative in the Korean tech industry anymore. Why is that? Is it because the Korean IT industry is mature? Is it because of government regulations? No. It's because there is no competition. Without competition, there is no innovation.

Silicon Valley, which Korea admires, is a place where competition is everyday life. The aforementioned Uber and Lyft, OpenAI and Google, Waymo and Zoox, Tesla are representative examples. Big tech companies in Silicon Valley and companies equivalent to them go all-in to surpass what competitors have brought out. Such infinite competition creates innovation in Silicon Valley. Over the past three years, I have seen countless people visiting Silicon Valley to find out how Silicon Valley's innovation is created. What was the answer they got from visiting Silicon Valley? I hope they found that Silicon Valley's endless innovation continues because of infinite competition.


theveryfirst@fnnews.com