South Korean operator SKT spends $100 million to invest in OpenAI competitor to develop AI model for telecom industry

2023.08.18

South Korean operator SKT spends $100 million to invest in OpenAI competitor to develop AI model for telecom industry


American AI startup Anthropic has partnered with South Korea's largest telecom operator SK Telecom (SKT) to develop a new large-scale language model (LLM) for the telecom market. To this end, SKT also invested $100 million in Anthropic.

The wind of AI large models has blown to the telecommunications industry.

According to reports, American AI start-up company Anthropic has reached a cooperation with South Korea's largest telecom operator SK Telecom (SKT) to develop a new large-scale language model (LLM) for the telecom market. To this end, SKT also invested $100 million in Anthropic.

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Founded by former OpenAI executives, Anthropic is one of the few AI laboratories focused on building LLM, chatbots, and developing the next generation of general artificial intelligence (AGI), and is considered a strong competitor of OpenAI. The company released the latest version of Claude AI last month.

Google is one of Anthropic’s largest investors, participating in the startup’s $450 million new funding round in May. Investors in the round also included Salesforce Ventures, Zoom Ventures and Spark Capital. After the financing, Anthropic’s valuation reached 4.1 billion US dollars.

According to the agreement, Anthropic will fine-tune Claude with the support of SKT to ensure that it meets the scenario-based service needs of SKT and global telecommunications companies.

Anthropic co-founder and chief scientific officer Jared Kaplan will lead the development of these projects, including developing a product roadmap and custom direction, resulting in a new telecom AI platform being developed by the Global Telco AI Alliance supply.

Geek.com learned that the Global Telecom Artificial Intelligence Alliance is a partner alliance announced earlier this year by operators such as SKT, Deutsche Telekom, Emirates Telecom Group, and Singtel. 

The alliance last month confirmed the new AI platform as the core foundation for new AI services, including the creation of digital assistants, improvements to existing telecom services and new "super apps" to deliver a range of AI services.

Each of the participating companies has appointed a C-Level executive as a representative to coordinate the overall collaboration to find ways to adopt generative AI within telecoms and offer it in an open-vendor manner.

Dario Amodei, co-founder and CEO of Anthropic, said: "SKT is ambitious in using AI to transform the telecom industry. We are excited to combine our AI expertise with SKT's industry knowledge to create a tailor-made solution for telecom companies. LLM." 

Yoo Young-sang, CEO of SKI, said: "Our two companies will work together to drive global AI innovation. By combining our Korean-based LLM with Anthropic's powerful AI capabilities, we hope to create synergies with global telecom partners and Gain leadership in the AI ​​ecosystem."

It is worth mentioning that, outside of this alliance, operators such as Vodafone and British Telecom (BT) are also actively exploring ways to use generative AI, indicating that the large AI model has attracted great attention from global telecom operators.