[NewsSpace=JeongYoung Kim] Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, who sparked the boom in generative artificial intelligence (AI), is attracting attention as he visits Korea accompanied by a Korean individual.

Altman visited Korea for the first time on the 9th. In the morning, he had a conversation with Lee Young, the Minister of the Ministry of SMEs and Startups, at the Grand Ballroom of the 63 Building. In the afternoon, he held a dialogue event with more than 1,000 participants, including domestic AI developers, researchers, entrepreneurs, and university students. Altman had previously announced that he would embark on a tour to major cities around the world, including Seoul, in March, and this visit marks the fulfillment of that plan.

Unlike other countries, this visit was accompanied by a large number of OpenAI executives. Previously, Altman had either traveled alone or was accompanied by only a few executives.

Among the entourage was a Korean individual. Anna, the wife of Greg Brockman, co-founder and chairman of OpenAI, was born in Korea. Although little is known about Anna, she married Brockman in 2018. The couple is known to have a high interest in Korea.

Joan Zhang, OpenAI Product Manager, is also of Korean descent. Zhang studied applied mathematics and computer science at Stanford University, where Sam Altman dropped out. She has had a keen interest in AI and applications, having worked at Dropbox and Google. At Google, she was in charge of natural language understanding for the AI assistant system, Google Assistant. She later joined OpenAI and is currently the product leader for the image generation AI called "DALL·E."

The presence of key OpenAI executives on this visit is also notable. Chairman Brockman is one of the core management members of OpenAI, along with CEO Altman and co-founder Ilya Sutskever. Brockman studied mathematics and computer science at Harvard University and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), but dropped out of both. He did so in order to join the payment startup Stripe as a founding member in 2010, similar to Altman dropping out of college to start the location-based social networking service (SNS) called "Loopt." In 2013, Brockman became the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Stripe and grew the company into a unicorn worth over 100 trillion won, making it one of the leading fintech companies in the United States. He then joined OpenAI in 2015. It is known that the startup incubator Y Combinator, which Altman once led, invested in Stripe, leading to their connection.

Bradly Wright, Chief Operating Officer (COO) of OpenAI, also accompanied the visit. He is also responsible for overseeing OpenAI's venture capital (VC) fund, "OpenAI Startup Fund," established last year. The fund has invested in small semiconductor chip manufacturer "Atomically" and AI development company for robot manipulation, "Covariant," among others. This raises interest in the possibility of OpenAI investing in or discussing collaborations with domestic AI startups.