Anthropic Secures $100 Million Investment from SK Telecom
Anthropic, an AI startup co-founded by former leaders of OpenAI, has announced a significant funding boost of $100 million from SK Telecom (SKT), one of South Korea's largest mobile carriers. This investment was publicly disclosed by SKT on Sunday.
This funding follows Anthropic's impressive $450 million raise during its Series C funding round, led by Spark Capital in May. Notably, SKT had participated in the Series C as well through its investment arm, SK Telecom Venture Capital (SKTVC). Additionally, just last month, SAP, a leading software company based in Germany, invested in Anthropic. SKT anticipates finalizing this latest investment in Q3 of this year, according to Chung Suk-geun, SKT's Chief AI Global Officer.
By investing in Anthropic, SKT aims to enter the fast-growing generative AI sector. The two companies plan to collaborate on developing a multilingual large language model uniquely tailored for global telecommunications firms. Jared Kaplan, co-founder and Chief Science Officer at Anthropic, will be at the helm of this customization effort and the overall product strategy.
"SKT has remarkable ambitions to leverage AI in transforming the telecommunications industry," said Dario Amodei, co-founder and CEO of Anthropic. "We're eager to combine our AI expertise with SKT’s industry insights to create a bespoke LLM specifically for telcos."
SKT aims to deliver diverse AI solutions to potential clients needing advanced AI capabilities through the new LLM. These offerings will target global telecommunications companies, as noted by Chung in an email interview. The Korean telecommunication leader is actively engaging with Global Alliance members to promote the jointly developed LLM, which will support multiple languages, including English, Korean, German, Japanese, Arabic, and Spanish.
Founded in 2021, Anthropic has been developing an AI system named Claude, similar to OpenAI's ChatGPT, designed to assist enterprises with various functions such as search, automated workflows, coding, and natural language processing. The company recently released an upgraded version, Claude Instant 1.2, enhancing its capabilities based on the strengths of its predecessor, Claude 2.
The applications of Claude in telecommunications will encompass "industry-specific customer service, marketing, sales, and dynamic consumer engagement," according to SKT.
"By merging our Korean language-focused LLM with Anthropic's advanced AI technologies, we hope to create synergy and establish a leadership position in the AI ecosystem alongside our global telco partners," stated SKT CEO Ryu Young-sang.
SKT has been dedicated to developing large language models for the Korean language for several years. Chung mentioned the company's initiation of a Korean version of BERT back in 2018. In addition, last year, SKT launched a beta version of a chatbot called A. dot, which received an upgrade in June to include the “Chat T” feature, powered by Microsoft’s Azure Open AI cloud services.
This article has been updated with the latest information from SK Telecom.
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