Through the investment, SKT and Anthropic will collaborate to develop a customized large language model for telcos by combining their respective expertise and experience.
Heaptalk, Jakarta — US artificial intelligence startup Anthropic will secure a $100 million investment from South Korean telecommunications company SK Telecom (SKT). Previously, SKT’s venture capital arm in Silicon Valley named SK Telecom Venture Capital (SKTVC) had injected investment in a Series C round into the startup.
Through the investment, SKT and Anthropic will collaborate to develop a customized large language model (LLM) for telecommunications companies by combining their respective expertise and experience. The LLM is expected to support multilingual features, spanning South Korean, English, German, Japanese, Arabic, and Spanish, as reported by TechCrunch. Co-founder and Chief Science Officer of Anthropic Jared Kaplan will lead the overall direction of customization and product roadmap.
“Combining our Korean language-based LLM with Anthropic’s strong AI capabilities, we expect to create a synergy and gain leadership in the AI ecosystem with our global telco partners,” said CEO of SKT Ryu Young-sang as quoted by TechCrunch.
SKT has developed a large language model in the Korean language over the years. The company built a Korean version of Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), a family of language models introduced in 2018 by researchers at Google. Further, in May 2022, SKT released a beta version of its AI chatbot named A., pronounced A dot. In June 2023, the company upgraded its chatbot by adding a feature called Chat T that is powered by Microsoft’s Azure Open AI cloud computing service.
Providing AI services to global telcos
SKT plans to provide several AI services to potential customers, including global telcos. Currently, the company is discussing LLM offerings with the Global Alliance members, including Deutsche Telekom, e&, and Singtel.
Meanwhile, Anthropic has developed an AI model similar to ChatGPT, named Claude which allows companies to manage several tasks, such as searching information, generating answers, automating workflows, coding, and processing text in natural conversations. Further, Claude’s use of the telecommunications industry will include industry-specific customer service, marketing, sales, and interactive consumer applications.
“SKT has incredible ambitions to use AI to transform the telco industry. We’re excited to combine our AI expertise with SKT’s industry knowledge to build an LLM that is customized for telcos,” said co-founder and CEO of Anthropic Dario Amodei as cited by TechCrunch.
