ChatGPT rival Anthropic lands $100m investment by SK Telecom

Anthropic, an AI startup co-founded by former senior members of OpenAI, has raised £78 million ($100 million) in funding from SK Telecom, one of the biggest mobile carriers in South Korea.

The two companies will build a multilingual large language model (LLM) customised for global telco firms.

“SK Telecom has incredible ambitions to use AI to transform the telco industry. We are excited to combine our AI expertise with SK Telecom’s industry knowledge to build an LLM that is customised for telcos,” said Dario Amodei, Co-founder and CEO of Anthropic. Amodei once served as OpenAI’s Vice President of Research.

The investment by SK Telecom is expected to close in Q3 2023, according to TechCrunch.

“By combining our Korean language-based LLM with Anthropic’s strong AI capabilities, we expect to create synergy and gain leadership in the AI ecosystem together with our global telco partners,” said Ryu Young-sang, CEO of SK Telecom.

SK Telecom is in talks with the Global Telco AI Alliance to offer the LLM to fellow members.

The LLM known as Claude will support several languages, including Korean, German, English, Japanese, Spanish and Arabic. Claude will also  include ‘industry-specific customer service, marketing, sales and interactive consumer applications’.

The overall direction of the customisation and product roadmap for the LLM will be led by Jared Kaplan, Chief Science Officer of Anthropic.

The funding announcement comes three months after Anthropic raised £353 million ($450 million) funding in its Series C round led by Stark Capital. Giants like Google, Salesforce, and Zoom also participated in the financing.

Image source: Anthropic

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