AI Patrol Robot Guards Deoksugung, Spots Fire From 3 Meters in Under 5 Seconds

* 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 tailored news items for each reader type.

1. Patrol Robot Appears at Deoksugung; Fire Alert in Under 5 Seconds After Detecting Smoke

- Key Summary: Neubility's AI autonomous-driving patrol robot "Neubie Shield Plus" conducted a fire-detection demonstration at Deoksugung Palace in Jung-gu, Seoul, on the 24th. The "Sunra-bot," named after the sullagun night patrols of the Joseon Dynasty, is equipped with more than six cameras, a thermal imaging camera and a vision-AI-based module, allowing it to detect heat from a distance of 3 to 4 meters and send an alert to the control center in under 5 seconds. The demonstration is a follow-up to the government's first demonstration-and-purchase project run by the Ministry of SMEs and Startups and the Korea Institute of Startup and Entrepreneurship Development, and Neubility was selected as an executing company for the Korea Heritage Service's "customized patrol robot for palaces and royal tombs" project. The Sunra-bot aims to cover about 300 kilometers of patrols through November 30, running three daytime rounds of 2 kilometers each and six nighttime rounds of 1 kilometer each per day.

2. [Exclusive] Turning Reviewers into Regulars: Baemin Expands Reorder Discount Nationwide

- Key Summary: Baemin expanded its "reorder amount discount" feature nationwide and began formal operation on the 24th. Under the setup, when a customer who has left a review reorders from the same restaurant, the discount is applied automatically regardless of the star rating or review content. In an earlier trial run at some Seoul restaurants in June and July, the reorder conversion rate at restaurants that set up the discount was about 10%, 1.4 times higher than the roughly 7% at restaurants that did not, and the time to reorder averaged 6.4 days, two days shorter than the 8.3 days at restaurants without it. Coupang Eats has also turned review events previously run by store owners into an official in-app feature with a dedicated tab since late February this year.

3. [Exclusive] Park Hyeon-joo's Confidence: "DigitalX Will Trigger Upheaval in the Crypto Market"

- Key Summary: Mirae Asset Group Chairman Park Hyeon-joo told Seoul Economic Daily on the 24th that DigitalX (formerly Korbit) would bring an upheaval. Regarding concerns of a price war over the one-year zero-fee policy on the won market, Park drew a line, calling it not a price war but a customer alliance. According to CoinGecko, Upbit and Bithumb hold about 98% of the domestic market, while DigitalX remains at around 0.5%. However, Mirae Asset Consulting acquired the entire third-party allotment paid-in capital increase worth about 50 billion won, raising its stake to 97.15%, and plans to grow DigitalX into an investment platform encompassing security token offerings (STOs), tokenization of real-world assets (RWAs) and stablecoins.

4. "Even 5MW Facilities Must Stay 300m Away": Patchwork Rules Threaten to Choke AI's Capillaries

- Key Summary: The Gwacheon City Council will discuss an urban-planning ordinance amendment at an extraordinary session on the 27th that would require data centers with contracted power of 5MW to be located 200 to 300 meters away from residential areas. Gwacheon City also asked the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport and the Korea Land & Housing Corporation (LH) in April to exclude data centers from the permitted uses of business-facility land in the Juam district, and holders of substitute-land compensation are protesting that the rules are being changed midway through the project. For edge-type data centers of around 10MW, a location close to users is itself a competitive edge. If pushed out of city centers, response speeds can drop and network costs can rise, and rent burdens grow for AI and cloud startups that lack their own infrastructure. Meanwhile, with no common nationwide standard, regulations vary: Seoul's Geumcheon-gu requires the consent of a majority of residents within a 200-meter radius, while Incheon restricts sites in general residential areas and requires urban-planning committee review for certain industrial areas located within 1 kilometer of residential areas.

5. Preserving Muscle While Shedding Only Fat: A "Game Changer" for the 135 Trillion Won Obesity Market

- Key Summary: According to pharmaceutical market research firm IQVIA, the global obesity drug market is projected to grow to $97.8 billion, or about 135 trillion won, by 2034. As the glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) class has exposed limits such as lean-mass loss and gastrointestinal side effects, development directions are also becoming more segmented into new mechanisms including dual and triple agonists and amylin. Hanmi Pharmaceutical's (128940) "HM17321," licensed out to Genentech, targets urocortin 2 (UCN2) rather than GLP-1, aiming to reduce fat and increase muscle at the same time, while Celltrion (068270) is set to release preclinical results for its quadruple agonist "CT-G32" in November. Daewoong Pharmaceutical (069620) is developing a microneedle patch technology, and Samsung Bioepis is conducting a preclinical study with G2GBIO (456160) on a once-monthly dosing regimen, heating up competition over dosing convenience.

6. Samsung Grafts GPU Functions onto HBM; SK hynix Stacks to 20 Layers

- Key Summary: Samsung Electronics (005930) and SK hynix (000660) each presented solutions to high-bandwidth memory (HBM) bottlenecks at "Hot Chips 2026," a semiconductor seminar held at Stanford University in the United States on the 23rd, local time. Han Sang-wook, technical leader (TL) of Samsung Electronics' Memory Business, cited the limits of through-silicon via (TSV) and physical layer (PHY) input/output as bottleneck factors and introduced ideas for customized HBM (cHBM) tailored to clients' graphics processing units (GPUs) and neural processing units (NPUs), along with grafting computing functions onto the base die. Lee Jae-sik, vice president of SK hynix America, cited changes in structure and materials as a solution for heat and said the company is researching hybrid bonding to stack memory 20 layers high. Hybrid bonding is a process that directly connects metal pads without an intermediate material, narrowing TSV circuits and enabling the core die thickness to be increased by 24%.