SKT injects $100m in Anthropic to develop customised LLM for telcos

South Korean telco giant SK Telecom (SKT) is injecting $100 million into San Francisco’s AI research company Anthropic to develop a large language model (LLM) for telecoms companies.

This follows previous investment from SK Telecom Venture Capital, the Silicon Valley-based investment arm of SKT.

According to SKT, the model will be multilingual supporting languages including Korean, English, German, Japanese, Arabic and Spanish.

It will be based off Anthropic’s AI model Claude and fine-tuned to telco use cases, including industry specific customer service, marketing, sales, and interactive consumer applications.

Upon completion, SKT said the LLM will integrated in the Telco AI Platform currently being built by the Global Telco AI Alliance.

According to SKT, 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 to their respective markets and customers.

“SKT has incredible ambitions to use AI to transform the telco industry,” said Dario Amodei, co-founder and CEO of Anthropic. “We see industry specific LLMs as having high potential to create safer and more reliable deployments of AI technology.”