Dr Young-Dall Lee

Dr Young-Dall Lee leads the Institute’s work on AI Policy & Regulation, and he has spent a decade inside the machinery that produces it. He sat on three presidential commissions of the Republic of Korea, covering science and technology, carbon neutrality and national education strategy, and advised four ministries between 2014 and 2024: Economy and Finance, Trade Industry and Energy, Land Infrastructure and Transport, and SMEs and Startups. He was Korea’s government advocate to the World Bank’s Doing Business assessment.

As Secretary General of the Governors Association of the Republic of Korea he directed coordination between the President and all seventeen provincial governors, and oversaw the Association’s liaison offices inside Korean embassies in six countries. He was a trustee of DGIST and sat on the strategy committee of the joint secretariat of Korea’s four institutes of science and technology.

He is Principal and Professor at NYET in New York, was Professor of Entrepreneurship and Strategy at Dongguk University, and researched innovation ecosystems at Baruch College. His argument is that the binding constraints in any technology ecosystem are set less by statute than by whoever owns the layer everything else is built on: CUDA, as he puts it, became a rule-setting layer rather than a product. He applies the same test to dependence, holding that the ability to enter a market matters and the ability to leave it matters more.