Yangsa, Accelerating 'AI Collaboration' Through Equity Investment
SKT Strengthens AI Personal Assistant via Business Partnership
SK Telecom announced on the 13th that it has invested $10 million (approximately 13.7 billion KRW) in the U.S.-based generative AI search engine startup ‘Perplexity’ to strengthen its collaboration in the generative AI search engine business.
Perplexity also plans to invest in ‘Global AI Platform Corporation,’ which SKT established last year in Silicon Valley, USA.
Perplexity handles over 230 million search requests worldwide each month. It ranked first overall in the chatbot usability evaluation announced by The Wall Street Journal last month.
The two companies signed a strategic partnership for AI search engine business collaboration at Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2024 held in Barcelona last February.
They will cooperate to advance the generative AI-based search engine for the global AI personal assistant service currently under development, including SKT’s A.(A.) service.
SKT will provide Korean language data and cultural content information and engage in comprehensive joint development with Perplexity, including fine-tuning large language models (LLM) and enhancing search solutions to improve Korean search performance.
SKT expects that once Perplexity’s search engine is integrated into its AI personal assistant platform, it will be able to perform functions such as conversational question answering, search result summarization, related search term suggestions, English translation, and summarization.
Dmitry Shvelenko, Chief Business Officer (CBO) of Perplexity, said, "We are pleased to secure the opportunity to offer Perplexity Pro services to SKT customers through this partnership. This is our first collaboration with a global telecom company, and we hope the partnership with SKT will continue long-term."
Lee Jae-shin, Vice President in charge of AI Growth Strategy at SKT, said, "Based on the cooperation between the two companies, we plan to enhance A. search capabilities and launch a top-tier AI personal assistant service both domestically and internationally."
© The Asia Business Daily(www.asiae.co.kr). All rights reserved.
