SK Telecom, the largest telco in South Korea, announced an additional investment of $100 million in Anthropic, a San Francisco-based artificial intelligence startup. SK Telecom Venture Capital, SKT’s venture capital arm, previously invested in Anthropic in May of this year.
In a collaborative agreement, the companies will co-create a language model tailored exclusively for telecommunications. Anthropic’s pre-existing AI model, Claude, will also undergo customization to align with the precise requisites of telcos.
Moreover, the AI startup will collaborate with SK Telecom to adapt Claude to telecom use cases, including industry-specific customer service, marketing, and sales initiatives, as well as interactive consumer apps. The company claims that organizations will gain improved performance compared to the implementation of more general models by tailoring the model to the telecom business.
Currently, the Global Telco AI Alliance develops the Telco AI Platform, and SKT and Anthropic will collaborate to add the multilingual LLM to it. Notably, the model will support numerous languages, including English, German, Spanish, Korean, Japanese, and Arabic.
“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.”
In May of this year, Anthropic raised $450 million in a Series C round led by Spark Capital. Google, Salesforce Ventures, Sound Ventures, and Zoom Ventures were among the investors. SK Telecom also participated in the round with a reportedly smaller investment. The company declined to reveal the size of its stake in Anthropic. The AI startup used the funds to expand its product offerings and foster AI safety research.
On a side note, Anthropic is a competitor of OpenAI, the developer of the viral AI-powered chatbot ChatGPT. Today, Anthropic’s Claude model is considered one of the main competitors of OpenAI’s large language model, GPT-4. Notably, the startup was founded by former senior members of OpenAI, Daniela Amodei, Dario Amodei, Jack Clark, and Jared Kaplan, in 2021. As of today, Anthropic had raised over $1.5 billion in funding.
Source: mPost
