SKT and Anthropic’s multilingual LLM is expected to boost the telco industry’s performance relative to the use of more general models. Credit: Deemerwha studio via Shutterstock.com.

South Korea’s SK Telecom (SKT) has confirmed an additional $100m investment in US-based artificial intelligence (AI) safety and research company Anthropic.

The two companies have also signed a partnership agreement, under which Anthropic will work in collaboration with SKT to develop a multilingual large language model (LLM) customised for telcos.

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The LLM will be capable of supporting various languages such as Korean, German, English, Japanese, Spanish and Arabic.

The joint effort will leverage SKT’s deep telecommunications experience, integrated with Anthropic’s AI model ‘Claude’ to address the requirements of the telcos industry.

Claude will be customised for telco applications, for instance, industry-specific marketing, sales, customer service and interactive consumer applications.

This customised model is expected to boost the telco industry’s performance relative to the use of more general models. 

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Work associated with the overall direction of industry customisation and the product roadmap will be carried out under the supervision of Anthropic co-founder and chief science officer Jared Kaplan.

The companies will bring this multilingual LLM to Telco AI Platform, which is currently being developed by Global Telco AI Alliance.

SKT CEO Ryu Young-sang said: “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.”

Telco AI platform will eliminate the telco industry’s need to develop their own LLMs, which is both cost and time-consuming, by allowing Global Telco AI Alliance members, including Deutsche Telekom, e& and Singtel, to develop AI services/apps customised for their respective markets and customers.

Anthropic CEO and co-founder Dario Amodei said: “We see industry-specific LLMs as having high potential to create safer and more reliable deployments of AI technology.”

Prior to the latest investment, the AI company also received investment from SKT’s Silicon Valley-based subsidiary SK Telecom Venture Capital.