Anthropic said it will work with SK Telecom to fine-tune its AI model Claude to specific telco use cases
Korean telco SK Telecom announced an additional investment of $100 million in Anthropic, an AI safety and research company based in San Francisco, California.
This new investment decision follows the previous investment from SK Telecom Venture Capital (SKTVC), the Silicon Valley-based venture capital arm of SK Telecom.
The Korean company has entered into a partnership agreement with Anthropic with the main aim of building a large language model (LLM) customized for telecom operators. Under the terms of the agreement, SK Telecom and Anthropic will jointly develop a multilingual LLM that supports languages including Korean, English, German, Japanese, Arabic and Spanish.
The partners said they will combine SK Telecom’s expertise in telecommunications with Anthropic’s AI technology, including its AI model, which is called Claude.
Anthropic said it will work with SK Telecom to fine-tune Claude to specific telco use cases, including industry specific customer service, marketing, sales and interactive consumer applications.
The Korean carrier and Anthropic will also work together to bring the multilingual LLM to the Telco AI Platform currently being built by the Global Telco AI Alliance.
SK Telecom, Deutsche Telekom, e& and Singtel have recently formed the Global Telco AI Alliance, with the main aim of creating a new customer experience through the use of AI technology. By removing the need for telcos to build their own LLMs, the Telco AI Platform will enable the members of the Global Telco AI Alliance to develop and offer AI services/apps customized to their respective markets and customers, the partners said.
“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.
Ryu Young-sang, CEO of SK Telecom, said: “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.”
Last year, Ryu had said SK Telecom aimed to become an artificial intelligence company. He stressed that the telco will shape itself into an AI company by combining AI with a wide range of connectivity technologies.
To achieve the new vision, the carrier unveiled the following three strategies designed to innovate its five business groups. Last year, the company rearranged its business into five different groups, namely fixed and mobile telecommunications, media, enterprise, AIVERSE (AI+Universe) and connected intelligence.
Firstly, the carrier said it will redefine its core businesses with AI. By achieving AI transformation of its fixed and mobile telecommunications, media and enterprise businesses, the company said it aims to create new opportunities and growth drivers.
SK Telecom said it will improve the overall process to enable customers to search, subscribe to and use fixed and mobile telecommunications services with greater convenience and ease by applying AI to this entire process.
