Anthropic, an artificial intelligence startup co-founded by former OpenAI leaders, will receive $100 million in funding from one of the biggest mobile carriers in South Korea, SK Telecom (SKT), the telco company announced on Sunday.
The funding news comes three months after Anthropic raised $450 million in its Series C funding round led by Spark Capital in May. Prior to the latest investment, SKT participated in the Series C round through its venture capital arm, SK Telecom Venture Capital (SKTVC). Just last month, Germany-based software company SAP also invested in Anthropic. SKT expects to close the investment in the third quarter of this year, chief AI global officer of SKT Chung Suk-geun told TechCrunch.
SKT is joining the white-hot generative AI space race via the strategic investment in Anthropic. The telco says Anthropic and SKT plan to co-develop a multilingual large language model customized for global telco firms. Co-founder and chief science officer of Anthropic Jared Kaplan will lead the overall direction of the customization and the product roadmap.
“SKT has incredible ambitions to use AI to transform the telco industry,” said Dario Amodei, co-founder and CEO of Anthropic. “We’re excited to combine our AI expertise with SKT’s industry knowledge to build an LLM that is customized for telcos.”
SKT plans to provide various AI services to potential customers that need AI capabilities using the LLM, including global telco firms, Chung said in an email interview with TechCrunch. The Korean telco company is in talks with the Global Alliance members to offer the LLM, which SKT and Anthropocene will jointly develop. The LLM would support English, Korean, German, Japanese, Arabic and Spanish languages.
Anthropic, founded in 2021, is building an AI system called Claude, like OpenAI’s Chat GPT, which enables corporations to manage tasks, including searching, generating answers, automating workflows, coding and processing text in natural conversations. Most recently, the Google-backed AI startup has released its updated version, Claude Instant 1.2, which incorporates the strengths of Claude 2, its second-generation AI chatbot.
Claude’s use cases for the telco industry will include “industry-specific customer service, marketing, sales and interactive consumer applications,” according to SKT.
“Combining our Korean language-based LLM with Anthropic’s strong AI capabilities, we expect to create synergy and gain leadership in the AI ecosystem with our global telco partners,” Ryu Young-sang, CEO of SKT, said in its statement.
SKT has been developing large language models for the Korean language for years. The company started building a Korean version of BERT in 2018, according to Chung. Moreover, SKT launched a chatbot A., called A dot, in beta last year and upgraded its chatbot by adding a feature, “Chat T,” which is powered by Microsoft’s Azure Open AI cloud computing service, to A dot in June.
This article has been updated with information from SKT.