Kakao's First AI Play Is Food Delivery, Teaming Up with Coupang Eats

*Editor's Note: 'AI PRISM' (Personalized Report & Insight Summarizing Media) is an "AI-based personalized news recommendation and summarization service" developed with support from the Korea Press Foundation. It selects and provides six customized news items by reader type.

1. Kakao's 'Vertical AI Collaboration' with Coupang Eats… Ordering Delivery Food via KakaoTalk

- Key Summary: Kakao has selected food delivery as the first vertical to integrate with its AI agent and is pursuing a partnership with Coupang Eats. Kakao CEO Chung Shin-a announced the plan on the 6th during a second-quarter earnings conference call, explaining that the structure involves an on-device AI model identifying intent based on conversation context and user preferences and connecting it to actual transactions. In contrast, the company distanced itself from infrastructure businesses such as AI data centers and GPU-based cloud, citing insufficient expected return on investment (ROI). Kakao's second-quarter consolidated revenue was 2.0985 trillion won and operating profit was 277 billion won, up 9% and 36% respectively from a year earlier, and the company has set a target of 20 million monthly active users (MAU) for AI services within KakaoTalk by year-end.

2. Meta Joins the 'AI Coding' Race

- Key Summary: Meta Platforms has released the beta version of its first AI coding agent, Muse Code, entering competition against OpenAI and Anthropic. CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained that Muse Code is a terminal-based tool that handles everything from planning changes to writing code and verifying results, and that it is powered by the coding-specialized model Muse Spark 1.2. In its own performance comparison, Muse Spark 1.2 scored 82.9% on Terminal-Bench 2.1, leading OpenAI's Codex (81.8%) but falling short of Anthropic's Claude Code (86.7%), while on DeepSWE 1.1 it scored 59.3%, trailing both products. Zuckerberg emphasized that it is easy to install and inexpensive, and the launch is interpreted as another attempt by Meta—which continues to make large-scale computing investments—to seek AI monetization.

3. Even a 'Legend' Departs… AI-Lagging Google Builds a Mountain View One Team

- Key Summary: Demis Hassabis is stepping down as CEO of Google DeepMind to become DeepMind chairman and Alphabet chief scientist. Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced the appointment on the 5th, and the DeepMind CEO position will be filled by former CTO Koray Kavukcuoglu with the title of senior vice president, reporting all matters directly to CEO Pichai. The reorganization comes as Alphabet chief scientist Jeff Dean, who led Gemini architecture and engineering during 27 years at the company, is leaving, along with colleagues including Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc Le. Earlier, Noam Shazeer moved to OpenAI and John Jumper moved to Anthropic, and Google, which has decided to invest $205 billion in AI this year, is realigning organizations dispersed across London and Mountain View around its headquarters.

4. Roborock with 'Korea Market Share of 50%'… Expands Lineup to Cordless and Steam

- Key Summary: Roborock, the world's No. 1 robot vacuum cleaner maker, has surpassed 50% market share in Korea's robot vacuum cleaner market while broadening its product range to cordless and steam cleaners. According to Roborock on the 6th, its products launched in Korea number 37 across four lines, with nine new products introduced this year alone, marking eight years since it entered Korea in 2019 with a single product, the Roborock S6. The F25 Steam vacuum-mop cleaner launched last month combines 95°C hot-water roller washing with 180°C high-temperature steam, and the H60 Hub Plus cordless vacuum cleaner features an automatic dust-emptying dock and up to 170W suction power. Roborock is also expanding offline experience events and after-sales service (AS) centers, while more than doubling its R&D investment from 619 million yuan in 2023 to 1.42 billion yuan last year.

5. IBK and Ecopro (086520) Team Up… Gyeongbuk Launches Venture Fund

- Key Summary: Gyeongsangbuk-do Province, together with IBK Industrial Bank of Korea and Ecopro, will create a 40.8 billion won venture fund to support the scale-up of regional startups. Gyeongbuk held a formation ceremony on the 6th at the Gyeongsan Nonghyup head office, and the fund will concentrate more than 35%, or 14.3 billion won, on Gyeongbuk companies or companies moving into Gyeongbuk, supporting the construction of the G-Star Valley linking Pohang, Gyeongsan, and Gumi. The funding consists of 16 billion won from the Korea Fund of Funds, 17 billion won from IBK, 7 billion won from Ecopro, and 400 million won each from IBK Asset Management and Ecopro Partners, with an operating period from this year through 2034. The province also plans to allocate more than 1.8 billion won for each region including Gyeongsan, Gyeongju, Gumi, and Pohang, and has proposed a plan to create more than 1 trillion won in venture funds by 2034.

6. "Not Even Gossip"… Jensen Huang, a 'God' to Nvidia Employees

- Key Summary: The high level of trust Nvidia employees place in CEO Jensen Huang stands out even more amid a wave of Big Tech layoffs. Meta cut 8,000 employees, or 10% of its total workforce, Microsoft reduced about 4,800, or 2.1%, and Oracle also cut its workforce by around 10%, but Nvidia is instead increasing its headcount. An Nvidia official said Huang is understood to have established a principle in 1996 of not conducting layoffs, and the last meaningful-scale workforce reduction was about 6.5% of the total during the 2008 global financial crisis. In addition, unlike other Big Tech firms that have moved to cut AI token usage costs, Nvidia encourages usage, and broadly provided stock compensation (RSU) and an employee stock purchase plan (ESPP)—offered from junior to senior levels—support employee cohesion.