Sunghee Yun (He/Him)

Co-Founder & CTO @ Erudio Bio, Inc., Co-Founder & Leader & Chair of Silicon Valley AI Nexus (AI Nexus), Advisor @ Korean American Semiconductor Professional Alliance (KASPA), CGO / Global Managing Partner @ LULUMEDIC, KFAS-Salzburg Global Leadership Initiative Fellow @ Salzburg Global Seminar, AI-Korean Medicine Integration Initiative Task Force Member @ The Association of Korean Medicine, Director of AI Semiconductor @ K-BioX, Visiting Professor @ Sogang University, Advisory Professor @ DGIST, Global Advisory Board Member @ Innovative Future Brain-Inspired Intelligence System Semiconductor of Sogang University, and Network Expert @ Gerson Lehrman Group

Abstract

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has moved from research labs to the center of the global economy in barely a decade, and understanding how this happened — and where it is heading — has become essential for anyone entering technology, engineering, or business. This talk offers a comprehensive tour of the modern AI landscape: how we arrived at this moment, what is happening right now at the frontier, and why the coming decade will matter more than any that preceded it.

We begin with the arc of AI history, tracing the field’s key inflection points: the deep learning revolution ignited by convolutional neural networks in 2012–2015, the Transformer architecture that changed everything in 2017–2018, and the cascade of breakthroughs through 2024 and 2025 — from GPT-4o and Claude to next-generation reasoning models — culminating in where frontier AI stands in 2026. Along the way, we examine what each leap actually changed, both technically and in terms of what machines can now do.

To ground this narrative in evidence, the talk then measures AI’s ascent through the numbers: adoption curves collapsing from decades to months, ChatGPT reaching tens of millions of users in mere weeks, NVIDIA’s meteoric rise, and capital flows at a scale rivaling national GDPs. These figures reveal a structural truth — AI is not one more technology wave, but a platform shift reshaping industries, work, and society at unprecedented speed.

The third movement focuses on the defining paradigm of the current moment: AI agents. We unpack what makes AI “agentic” — the perceive-plan-reason-act loop that distinguishes goal-pursuing systems from prompt-responding ones — survey the cutting-edge agent tools emerging from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and the open-source community, and examine the full agentic stack in which the LLM is the engine but not the whole system.

Finally, the talk turns from landscape to lived experience: how these forces play out in practice, illustrated through the speaker’s own journey from semiconductors at Samsung and applied science at Amazon to co-founding Erudio Bio, where AI meets biology to transform drug development and diagnostics. The message for the next generation is direct — the decade ahead will be shaped by those who understand both the technology and the ecosystems around it, and there has never been a better time to begin.