Following Series C Investment, $100 Million Strategic Equity Investment Decided
Joint Development of Multilingual LLM Supporting English, German, Arabic, and More
SK Telecom has made a 100 billion won investment in the U.S. artificial intelligence (AI) innovation company ‘Anthropic,’ accelerating its efforts to secure global AI leadership.
On the 13th, SKT announced that it will make an investment of approximately 100 billion won in Anthropic to actively collaborate with a leading company representing the generative AI era.
SKT explained that this equity investment holds significance beyond a simple financial investment. As a strategic investor, SKT expects to build a strong partnership between the two companies through this investment and, based on this, anticipate sustainable business synergies among SKT, Anthropic, and the Global Telco AI Alliance.
Headquartered in San Francisco, USA, Anthropic is a generative AI innovation company co-founded in 2021 by researchers from OpenAI. Anthropic’s ‘Claude’ is regarded as one of the most advanced AI chatbots currently available, alongside OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Recently, it also attracted large-scale investments from major U.S. big tech companies such as Google and Salesforce.
Anthropic’s technological capabilities have already garnered significant attention in the industry. In particular, it has a major strength in safety by applying ‘Constitutional AI’ technology, which minimizes the harmfulness of generative AI?a recent issue. In May, U.S. President Joe Biden invited CEOs from four companies, including Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI, to the White House to discuss security and safety issues related to AI technology.
SKT and Anthropic plan to collaborate on joint development of large language models (LLM) and the establishment of AI platforms. They will first develop multilingual LLMs together, including Korean, English, German, Japanese, Arabic, and Spanish. SKT aims to further enhance the performance of its own developed and owned LLMs while expanding new multilingual LLM models with Anthropic to create synergy through cooperation and self-strengthening.
In particular, Anthropic will supply SKT with tools to fine-tune and optimize basic large language models according to specific purposes. Jared Kaplan, the developer of GPT-3 and co-founder of Anthropic, will be responsible for the overall technical direction and development roadmap of the LLM.
The jointly developed LLMs by the two companies will be provided to domestic companies through SKT, alongside Anthropic’s Claude model. As Anthropic’s official premier partner, SKT will leverage excellent price competitiveness to attract customers and expand its business.
Additionally, the two companies will collaborate on developing AI platforms based on multilingual LLMs to develop AI services for the ‘Global Telco AI Alliance,’ which is centered around SKT.
Based on this, companies such as Deutsche Telekom (German), e& (Arabic), and Singtel (English) will be able to rapidly develop AI services for end users by reflecting their respective requirements and local characteristics.
Considering that developing proprietary LLMs for generative AI services requires enormous capital and time, this collaboration with Anthropic is expected to significantly reduce various resources.
SKT CEO Yoo Young-sang said, “We will accelerate cooperation based on the strategic investment in Anthropic, a world-class AI tech company,” adding, “By combining SKT’s Korean AI technology with Anthropic’s global AI capabilities, we plan to lead the AI ecosystem together with global telecom companies.”
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