SK telecom (SKT) today announced that it is investing additional USD 100 million in Anthropic, an AI safety and research company based in San Francisco. This follows the previous investment from SK Telecom Venture Capital (SKTVC), the Silicon Valley-based venture capital arm of SKT. SKT has entered into a partnership agreement with Anthropic to build a large language model (LLM) customized for telcos.
Under the agreement, SKT and Anthropic will jointly develop a multilingual LLM that supports languages, including Korean, English, German, Japanese, Arabic and Spanish.
By working together, the companies will combine SKT’s deep experience in telecommunications with Anthropic’s state-of-the-art AI technology including its AI model Claude. The industry model will be customized to best meet the needs of telcos.
In particular, Anthropic will work with SKT to fine-tune Claude to telco use cases, including industry specific customer service, marketing, sales, and interactive consumer applications. By customizing the model to the telco industry, telcos will benefit from increased performance relative to the use of more general models. Jared Kaplan, a Co-Founder and Chief Science Officer of Anthropic, will oversee the overall direction of the industry customization as well as the product roadmap.
SKT and Anthropic will work together to bring the multilingual LLM to the Telco AI Platform currently being built by the Global Telco AI Alliance.
By removing the need for telcos to build their own LLMs, which requires a large amount of cost and time, the Telco AI Platform will enable the members of the Global Telco AI Alliance – including Deutsche Telekom, e& and Singtel – to develop and offer AI services/apps customized to their respective markets and customers in a speedy and efficient manner.
SKT’s strong partnership with Anthropic, which follows the launch of the Global Telco AI Alliance, is expected to create sustainable business synergy for SKT, Anthropic and the Global Telco AI Alliance.
“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 a LLM that is customized for telcos. We see industry specific LLMs as having high potential to create safer and more reliable deployments of AI technology,” said Dario Amodei, Co-Founder and CEO of Anthropic.
“With our strategic investment in Anthropic, a global leading AI technology company, we will be working closely with Anthropic to promote AI innovation,” said Ryu Young-sang, CEO of SKT. “By combining our Korean language-based LLM with Anthropic’s strong AI capabilities, we expect to create synergy and gain leadership in the AI ecosystem together with our global telco partners.”