Long-Term Jobless Youth Surge 13.5% in Two Years

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

1. 'Youth Resting Without a Job for More Than a Year' Up 13.5% in Two Years

Key Summary: In the first half of this year, the number of resting youth who had been without a job for more than a year or had never held a job reached 427,143, a sharp 13.5% increase compared to 2024. The share of long-term jobless among the total resting population in their 20s and 30s soared from 56.6% in 2024 to 62.4% this year, meaning more than six out of 10 resting youth have stayed outside the labor market for more than a year. By contrast, resting youth who had held a job within the past year declined, making a dual structure increasingly clear in which those with experience find re-employment while those with long gaps fail to return. Experts warn that the longer the unemployment period lasts, "negative duration dependence"—in which both job skills and motivation to seek work decline together—may emerge.

2. LG's EXAONE Goes to the Classroom, Nurturing 30,000 AI Talents

Key Summary: LG Group provides free education at the LG Discovery Labs in Magok, Seoul, and Busan, where 33,000 middle and high school students each year experience the principles of AI and robotics without coding. More than 5,000 students participate annually in the AIMERS program for university students and young adults, building practical skills through hackathons based on real industry data. In March this year, the in-house graduate school "LG AI Graduate School" launched as the first among domestic companies to receive Ministry of Education accreditation, in an assessment that a life-cycle AI education ladder extending to employees has been completed. The analysis holds that as a step-by-step education system connecting teenagers to in-house talent takes shape, the channels for capability development have widened for students preparing for careers in the AI field.

3. Kakao "Korean Improved 30%"... 'Kanana-2' Released as Open Source

Key Summary: Kakao released four models in its lightweight language model (SLM, small AI model) Kanana-2 series as open source on the global AI platform Hugging Face. By applying its own Korean-specialized tokenizer, it boosted Korean-language processing efficiency by more than 30% compared to before, and maintained stable performance while reducing memory by up to 72.7% through a sliding window attention structure. Distributed under the "Kanana Open License," which permits even commercial use, the technology can be used without separate restrictions by any developer, startup, or research institution. The analysis holds that the ability to implement services using open-source AI models is emerging as a major differentiating factor in preparing for employment in the AI field.

4. Hyundai Motor Group to Deploy Atlas at Overseas Customers for First Time Next Year

Key Summary: Boston Dynamics, an affiliate of Hyundai Motor Group, will deliver its humanoid robot Atlas to global companies next year to conduct its first pilot tests. It is equipped with collective intelligence technology in which, once one Atlas at a given site learns a new manipulation capability, it is automatically applied to all Atlas units at that customer. Hyundai Wia plans to invest 400 billion won in its robot business over the medium to long term, building production facilities at its Changwon plant and others and making strategic investments in AI startups. Demand for convergence talent spanning both hardware and AI software at manufacturing and logistics sites is expected to expand in earnest.

5. Waymo Establishes Korean Subsidiary... Domestic Autonomous Driving Ecosystem 'On Alert'

Key Summary: Waymo, the autonomous driving company under Google's parent company Alphabet, completed the establishment of its domestic subsidiary "Waymo Korea" on the 24th of this month. With the entry of the world's largest robotaxi operator, whose cumulative autonomous driving distance reaches 355 million kilometers, a mood has formed in which domestic startups such as RideFlux and MARS Auto also need to accelerate internalizing technology. While immediate robotaxi operation is difficult under current regulations, the government's conditional approval of exporting high-precision maps abroad has been assessed as opening a foundation for building domestic data. Demand for talent in autonomous driving software and data is expected to expand rapidly.

6. Fastest Aging Pace in the World... Working-Age Population the Size of Haeundae-gu Vanishes in One Year

Key Summary: Last year, Korea's working-age population fell by 393,000, and with it taking seven years for the share of those aged 65 and older to rise from 14% to 20%, the country was assessed as having the fastest aging pace among OECD members. The KDI forecast that the contribution of labor input to growth will turn negative around 2030 and that the potential growth rate will fall to the low 1% range by 2030. Experts recommended spreading AI and robotics not only across manufacturing but throughout the service industry to raise the value added per worker, and emphasized the need to strengthen education and vocational training. The analysis holds that amid the structural change of a declining working-age population, the scarcity value of talent equipped with the ability to utilize AI and robotics will rise.