The investment announcement comes three months after Anthropic raised $450 million in its Series C investment circular addressed through Spark Capital in May. Prior to the most recent investment, SKT participated in the Series C circular with its venture capital arm, SK Telecom Venture Capital (SKTVC). Last month, Germany-based software company SAP also invested in Anthropic. SKT expects to close the investment in the third quarter of this year, Chung Suk-geun, SKT’s global head of AI, told TechCrunch.
SKT joins the race for generative AI through a strategic investment in Anthropic. The telecom operator says Anthropic and SKT plan to jointly develop a great style of multilingual language custom-designed for global telcos. Anthropic’s co-founder and chief clinical officer, Jared Kaplan, will lead the overall direction of product customization and roadmap.
“SKT has ambitions to use AI to reshape the telecommunications industry,” said Dario Amodei, co-founder and CEO of Anthropic. “We are excited to combine our AI expertise with SKT’s industry wisdom to create a custom-designed LLM for telecom operators. »
SKT plans to supply various AI facilities to prospective consumers who want AI functions employing LLM, adding global telecom companies, Chung said in an email interview with TechCrunch. The Korean telecommunications company is in talks with members of the Global Alliance to propose the LLM, which SKT and Anthropocene will be jointly developed. The LLM would be English, Korean, German, Japanese, Arabic and Spanish.
Anthropic, founded in 2021, is building an artificial intelligence formula called Claude, like OpenAI’s GPT Chat, that allows corporations to manage responsibilities by aggregating searches, generating responses, automating workflows, coding and word processing in natural conversations. Most recently, the Google-backed AI startup released its updated version, Claude Instant 1. 2, which incorporates the strengths of Claude 2, its second-generation AI chatbot.
Claude’s use instances for the telecommunications industry will come with “interactive applications of services for visitors, marketing, sales and industry-specific customers,” according to SKT.
“By combining our Korea-based LLM with Anthropic’s AI capabilities, we hope to create synergy and gain leadership in the AI ecosystem with our global telecom partners,” said Ryu Young-sang, chief executive officer of SKT, in his statement.
SKT has been creating excellent language models for the Korean language for years. The company began building a Korean edition of BERT in 2018, according to Chung. In addition, SKT introduced an A. chatbot, called A dot, in beta last year and updated it. its chatbot adding a feature, “Chat T,” which works through Microsoft’s Azure Open AI cloud service, to A dot in June.
This article has been updated with data from SKT.
Anthropic Raises $450 Million to Create Next-Generation AI Assistants