SKT recently announced investing an additional USD 100 million in Anthropic, an AI safety and research company based in San Francisco. This funding follows a previous investment from SK Telecom Venture Capital (SKTVC) – SKT’s Silicon Valley-based venture capital arm. And SKT has partnered with Anthropic to build a large language model (LLM) customized for telcos.
As part of the deal, SKT and Anthropic will jointly develop a multilingual LLM that supports languages, including Korean, English, Japanese, and Spanish. And 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 meet the needs of telcos best.
Anthropic will work with SKT to fine-tune Claude to telco use cases, including industry-specific customer service, marketing, sales, and interactive consumer applications. And by customizing the model to the telco industry, telcos will benefit from increased performance relative to more general models. Jared Kaplan, a Co-Founder and Chief Science Officer of Anthropic, will oversee the overall direction of the industry customization and the product roadmap.
KEY QUOTES:
“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. We see industry-specific LLMs as having high potential to create safer and more reliable deployments of AI technology.”
— 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. 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.”
— Ryu Young-sang, CEO of SKT
