Blog
Writing on AI, research, technology, and everyday questions.
Essays and technical writing in English and Korean, including my Medium posts and articles co-written with collaborators.
All writing on MediumPhotonics & AI
Photonic systems, AI infrastructure, and the ideas shaping computation.
· Medium
130 Billion Tokens for Navier-Stokes: Why AI Needs Photonics
OpenAI recently claimed that an internal AI system made major progress on the Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness problem, one of the Millennium Prize Problems. The result is still disputed, so I would not say…
Read on Medium· Medium
Everyone Is Arguing About Whether AI Capex Is Rational. That’s the Wrong Question.
It can be individually rational and collectively ruinous at the same time. Those were never contradictory. Here is the number, and it is worth sitting with for a second. Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet, and Meta are on…
Read on Medium· Medium
AI Didn’t Remove the Bottleneck. It Made You the Bottleneck.
It’s almost midnight and I’m watching three terminals. In each one, an AI agent is doing a piece of my research: one is refactoring my analysis code, one is drafting a section of a paper, one is hunting down a bug.…
Read on Medium· Terry (Taehan) Kim’s blog
From Memory to Photonics: Solving the Next Bottleneck in AI Scaling
How photonic interconnects address data-movement bottlenecks in AI systems, and why inverse design, interpretability, and fabrication-aware refinement matter for scaling them.
Read article· Medium
GPUs Are Not Crude Oil. And Jensen Huang Knows It.
There’s a debate going around that sounds technical on the surface but is really one of the most important geopolitical arguments of our time: should the US strictly control the export of Nvidia GPUs to China, the…
Read on Medium· Medium
The Hyperloop for Data: Integrated Photonics and the Infrastructure of the New Digital Empire
The modern age is defined by its empires: Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft. Their territories are not marked by oceans or mountains, but by vast, gleaming data centers — the digital cities that house the sum total of…
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The New Roman Empire: How Big Tech is Conquering the World One Data Center at a Time
The race for AI dominance looks a lot like ancient territorial expansion — and the parallels are kind of terrifying I was reading about Roman history the other day when something clicked. All those maps showing the…
Read on Medium· Medium
Critical Thinking, Brain Rot & ChatGPT
Is ChatGPT doing more harm than good? and how to ask the correct why’s with it When I was young, my mom had a term for our television: 바보상자—literally ‘dumb box’ in English. As an educator herself, she…
Read on MediumLife & reflections
Research life, philosophy, and everyday observations.
· Medium
어려움 자체에는 아무 가치가 없다
예전에는 굳이 어려운 문제를 찾아서 할 필요가 없다고 생각했다. 같은 결과를 낼 수 있다면 당연히 더 쉽고, 빠르고, 효율적인 방법이 좋은 방법이라고 생각했다. 굳이 돌아갈 이유도 없고, 일부러 고생할 이유는 더더욱 없었다. 그런데 연구를 하다 보니 어려움을 보는 시선이 조금씩 바뀌었다. 쉬운 문제는 나에게만 쉬운 게 아니었다. 내가 금방 풀 수 있는 문제라면 다른 사람도 금방 풀 수…
Read on Medium· Medium
The Crosswalk Button and the Illusion of Time and Control
You have probably seen the crosswalk button while waiting for the pedestrian light to change. Many of us press it hoping the signal will turn faster. I do it too. Sometimes I press it more than once, convincing…
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Where the Sidewalk Is Wrong
It’s 8:00 AM on a Tuesday in Ann Arbor. The wind has found every gap in my jacket, and my car is exiled to the far edge of North Campus parking: standard operating conditions for an engineering grad student in…
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Never Trust How You Feel Past 9 PM: Lessons from Odysseus
You have probably seen the famous meme of sonic telling you to “never trust how you feel about your life past 9 PM”. This was, and still is, one of my favorite memes that I send to my close friends, especially during…
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Does Reality Need an Audience?
Does the universe keep working when nobody’s watching?
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Bird Poop Paradox: Why Bird-Poop Sidewalks Might Be the Safest Place to Walk
I, myself, am not a big fan of bird poop.
Read on Medium