How I Got Hooked on AI

Am I Dumb?

In high school, I gave everything to studying.

Many Korean students do. But I took it further than most. I was at my desk until 2 AM most nights. For three years. Even during breaks, while other kids talked in the hallway, I had my nose in my books. I didn't hang out. I didn't slack off. I poured every hour I had into it.

My grades went up, sure. But never in proportion to the hours I put in. Kids who studied half as much scored higher. Behind my back, my friends had an explanation: "KB doesn't sleep, eat, or breathe without a book. He literally has no life. Some people just aren't built for this."

That sentence lived in my head for years. Not as curiosity. As a wound.

I Couldn't Order at Subway

Somehow I got into Yonsei, one of Korea's top schools.

You'd think that would settle things. It made them worse. The kids from foreign language high schools spoke English like they'd grown up in New York. My English sounded like I'd learned it from a textbook. Because I did.

"Pure luck that KB got into this school with that English."

It was a joke. We were close, and I laughed like I didn't care. But it left something like a scar.

I'm pretty sure that's what pushed me to go to the U.S. as an exchange student. Not for the cultural experience everyone talks about. I needed to prove, mostly to myself, that I could actually speak this language.

My first week, I walked into a Subway. The sandwich shop. The employee looked at me. "What can I get you?" I knew what I wanted. Six-inch Italian BMT on wheat. I'd rehearsed it in my head on the walk over. Twice. But standing there, with the line growing behind me and the employee waiting, my mouth opened and nothing came out. Just me, frozen, staring at the menu like I'd never seen the English alphabet before.

I pointed at something. I don't even remember what I got.

You want to know what it feels like to know every grammar rule in a language and still not be able to use it? It feels like drowning in three feet of water.

The Formulas Weren't the Point

So was I just bad at English?

Was that the whole story: 'Korean kid can't order a sandwich, the end?' No. Because I'd experienced the exact opposite with math and science.

In my high school years, I beat kids who later got into med school. Not because I memorized formulas. I forgot them all the time. But I'd solved so many different problems that I could see how to approach a new one before I even picked up my pen. The formulas weren't the point. The practice was.

With English, I'd only ever had the formulas. Grammar rules, vocabulary lists, reading comprehension. I could read just fine. But I'd almost never actually spoken it. And millions of Korean students were in the same boat. Ten years of English education, almost zero real conversation. It wasn't that we were bad at languages. We'd just never practiced the one thing that actually matters: opening our mouths.

Two wounds were starting to feel like one. Different problems. Same feeling. I was doing everything the system asked me to do. And it wasn't working. Something was fundamentally off about how I was taught. I could feel it, but I couldn't prove it.

I'd always been drawn to science and technology, even as a political science major. I spent more time reading about tech than policy. But I'd never connected that curiosity to the question from high school.

Then AlphaGo happened.

What If the Problem Was Never Me?

A machine beat Lee Sedol at Go.

Go isn't like chess. Go has 10¹⁷⁰ possible positions. The entire observable universe has 10⁸⁰ atoms. No computer was supposed to crack this for decades.

But AlphaGo didn't brute-force it. It didn't study grandmaster strategies. It didn't follow programmed rules. It learned by doing, failing, adjusting, and doing again, until patterns emerged that no human had ever seen. Not programmed. Grown. From nothing but raw experience.

Every hour at my desk until 2 AM. Every grammar rule I memorized. Every test I crammed for. I followed the rules my entire life. This machine followed none. And it won. I'd been caught in what I now think of as the Rule Trap. And this machine just broke out of it.

What if the problem was never me?

What if the entire way we think about learning is just... wrong?

And this machine just proved it?

Looking back, I think that's the moment that eventually pulled me out of law school and into AI.