Science ministry unveils nationwide AI learning and startup project

The science ministry said it will launch the Everyone's AI Growth Ladder Project, a national program linking learning, development and field testing to build AI skills and turn ideas into youth startups.

The Ministry of Science and ICT will hold a joint opening ceremony on Aug. 3 at the National Gwangju Science Museum for an online learning portal, an AI development platform and regional hubs. The project was prepared under the government's AI-for-everyday-life policy and follows a recommendation in the National AI Action Plan to connect education, development and demonstration infrastructure that had previously operated separately.

The Everyone's AI Learning Center will be open to school and university students, young people and the general public. A generative-AI chatbot will recommend courses based on users' interests and learning levels. The portal links government-run education platforms including EBS I-Soph, School AI, K-MOOC, STEP, the AI Digital Learning Center and the Small Business Knowledge Learning Center. From August, the ministry plans to expand links to private education platforms and introduce learning-history management and personalized course curation.

The Everyone's AI Laboratory will offer a natural-language vibe-coding environment, subscription tokens for generative-AI models, private cloud services and development tools, as well as technical consulting. The platform will support users with 99,000 public and private data resources and 13,000 application programming interfaces. It will also add an idea community and a forum for users to share development results and feedback.

Offline Everyone's AI Lounges will be established across five regions in 2026, where AI specialists will coach newcomers in building services and bring residents and experts together to identify local issues and test AI services. Teams identified through the laboratory and lounges will receive early-stage legal, marketing and technical consulting, alongside help commercializing their work. "We will build a robust foundation for AI for all so its benefits do not remain limited to particular groups or regions, but reach every citizen," Science Minister Bae Gyeong-hun said.