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The state-run Korea Development Bank (KDB) signed an initial agreement on Tuesday with the US artificial intelligence (AI) research firm OpenAI to jointly foster the growth of AI ecosystem in the country, bank officials said. 

Under the memorandum of understanding (MOU), the two sides will collaborate to boost the local AI ecosystem and facilitate the development of Korean language-based AI models, they added.

This marks OpenAI's first MoU with any South Korean entity, reports Yonhap news agency. "The sophistication of the AI industry will be the gauge of national competitiveness from now on, and KDB will work as a government affairs coordinator for OpenAI to help the company operate in South Korea," KDB Chairman Kang Seog-hoon said.

OpenAI's chief strategy officer Jason Kwon said in a press release that South Korea is a leading country in the field of AI and the MOU agreement with KDB has been made under the "common" goal of the two sides to advance Seoul's AI ecosystem.

Meanwhile, the rate of online searches via Naver, South Korea's leading internet portal operator, in the country has seen a significant drop over the past nine years amid growing competition, an industry report showed last week.

The Korean portal giant took up a 57.32 percent share of the domestic search engine market in the first 10 months of this year, followed by global search engine Google at 33.9 percent, according to the report by the Institute of Information & Communications Technology Planning & Evaluation.

The report said AI technology shifted the paradigm of the search market after OpenAI's ChatGPT, a generative AI model, was released in 2022, from offering a list of information to users' questions to providing a more customized and summarized answer.

This year, foreign search engines with AI features, including those of Google and Microsoft, showed sharp growth in the domestic market, according to the report.