SK Telecom (SKT) announced on August 13 that it has invested USD 100 million (KRW 130 billion) in Anthrophic, a U.S. generative AI company, and entered into a partnership to strengthen cooperation in the AI business.
This major investment follows SKT's Series C investment in Anthrophic in May. SKT and Anthropic will work together to bring the multilingual Large Language Model (LLM) to the Telco AI Platform currently being built by the Global Telco AI Alliance.
Together with the "Global Telco AI Alliance" launched last month, this cooperation is expected to add strength to SKT's global AI competitiveness.
SKT's equity investment in Antropic is more than just a financial investment. As a strategic investor, SKT explained that this investment will build a strong partnership between the two companies and create sustainable business synergies between SKT-Anthropic-Global Telco AI Alliance.
Headquartered in San Francisco, USA, Anthropic is a generative AI innovation company co-founded in 2021 by former OpenAI researchers. Anthropic's "Claude" is considered one of the most advanced AI chatbots in existence, alongside OpenAI's Chatgpt.
Anthropic's technology has already garnered a lot of attention in the industry. In particular, it has applied "Constitutional AI" technology to minimize the harmful effects of generative AI, which has become a recent issue.
In May, US President Joe Biden invited the CEOs of four companies, including Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI, including Anthropic, to the White House to discuss security and safety issues for AI technology.
SKT and Anthropic plan to jointly develop multilingual LLMs for global telecommunications companies, including Korean, English, German, Japanese, Arabic, and Spanish. SKT will further enhance the performance of the LLM it has already developed and owned, while expanding the new multilingual LLM model with Anthropic.
In particular, Anthropic will provide SKT with tools to fine-tune and optimize the underlying mega-language model according to its purpose. To this end, GPT-3 developer and Anthropic co-founder Jared Kaplan will be responsible for the overall technical direction and development roadmap of the LLM.
Together, the LLM, along with Anthropic's cloud model, will be made available to South Korean enterprises through SKT. SKT will serve as Anthropic's official premier partner to attract customers and expand its business.
“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.”
