South Korean operator SKT invests $100 million in OpenAI competitor to develop large-scale AI models for the telecommunications industry

The trend of big AI models has reached the telecommunications industry.

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

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Anthropic, founded by former OpenAI executives, is one of a handful of AI labs focused on building LLMs, chatbots, and developing the next generation of general artificial intelligence (AGI), and is seen as a strong competitor to OpenAI. The company released the latest version of Claude AI last month.

Google is one of Anthropic’s largest investors, having participated in a $450 million round of funding for the startup in May. Other investors in the round included Salesforce Ventures, Zoom Ventures and Spark Capital. After the funding, Anthropic’s valuation reached $4.1 billion.

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

Anthropic co-founder and chief science officer Jared Kaplan will lead the development of these projects, including defining product roadmaps and custom directions, and the results will be made available on a new telecom AI platform being developed by the Global Telco AI Alliance.

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 Singapore Telecommunications.

The alliance confirmed the new AI platform last month 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 seek ways to adopt generative AI within telecommunications and deliver it in an open vendor approach.

“SKT has ambitious plans to transform the telecommunications industry using AI,” said Dario Amodei, co-founder and CEO of Anthropic. “We are excited to combine our AI expertise with SKT’s industry knowledge to create a tailor-made LLM for telecommunications companies.”

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

It is worth mentioning that outside of this alliance, operators such as Vodafone and BT are also actively exploring ways to use generative AI, indicating that AI big models have attracted great attention from telecom operators around the world.