Anthropic Receives $100 Million in Funding From Korean Telco SK Telecom

Artificial intelligence startup Anthropic is set to receive $100 million in funding from South Korean mobile giant SK Telecom (SKT), according to an announcement by SKT on Sunday.

TechCrunch reported that this funding development follows Anthropic's successful Series C funding round three months ago, where it raised $450 million, with Spark Capital leading the round. SKT had also joined in the Series C funding through its venture capital arm, SK Telecom Venture Capital.

SKT's Foray Into the Generative AI Field

The latest investment news comes shortly after software company SAP invested in Anthropic. The investment is expected to conclude in the third quarter of this year, as stated by SKT's chief AI global officer, Chung Suk-geun.

SKT's strategic investment in Anthropic marks its entry into the generative AI sector. The two entities intend to collaboratively create a multilingual large language model (LLM) tailored for global telecommunications companies.

Jared Kaplan, co-founder and chief science officer of Anthropic, will oversee the customization and product roadmap. Dario Amodei, Anthropic's CEO, expressed excitement about joining forces with SKT, a company with aspirations to leverage AI for transformative changes in the telecommunications industry.

Their goal is to craft an LLM customized to the specific needs of telcos. SKT plans to offer diverse AI services using the LLM to potential customers requiring AI capabilities, primarily targeting global telco firms.

The Korean telecommunications company is discussing joint development with Global Alliance members. The multilingual LLM aims to support languages such as English, Korean, German, Japanese, Arabic, and Spanish. Anthropic is currently working on creating an AI system called "Claude," which bears a resemblance to OpenAI's ChatGPT.

Claude's capabilities span tasks like searching, generating replies, automating workflows, coding, and interpreting natural text dialogues. The latest iteration, Claude Instant 1.2, integrates the advantages of its second-generation AI chatbot, Claude 2.

Combining Korean LLM With AI Capabilities of Anthropic

Claude finds practical application in the telecommunications domain, as highlighted by SK Telecom (SKT). Its uses encompass tailored customer service, marketing, sales, and interactive consumer-oriented applications.

"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 a statement.

SKT has dedicated years to developing extensive language models for the Korean language. The company embarked on creating a Korean version of BERT in 2018 and introduced chatbot A., known as A dot, in beta last year.

In June, the chatbot underwent an enhancement that introduced "Chat T," which derives its power from Microsoft's Azure Open AI cloud computing service.