Anthropic secures $100m boost from SK Telecom for new AI venture
Anthropic, the US artificial intelligence startup founded by ex-OpenAI luminaries, is set to receive $100m (£78.7m) in backing from South Korean telecoms company SK Telecom (SKT).
The cash injection will fund the creation of a multilingual large language model (LLM), jointly developed by Anthropic and SKT, according to an announcement made by the telecoms giant late Sunday.
A LLM is an advanced AI system that can understand and generate language-based text.
Working in English, Korean, German, Japanese, Arabic and Spanish, the LLM will allow global telco companies including Deutsche Telekom, e&, and Singtel to “offer AI services/apps customised to their respective markets and customers”.
SKT said it will include “industry-specific customer service, marketing, sales and interactive consumer applications”.
The firm said it hopes the investment will help it “secure a competitive edge” in the AI market
In May, Anthropic raised $450m worth of funding from VC firm Spark Capital in a triumphant Series C funding round.
Just last month, Anthropic also caught the eye of German software heavyweight SAP, which invested an undisclosed sum in the startup along with generative AI rivals Cohere and Aleph Alpha.
Anthropic is also building an AI system called Claude, which is similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT except it claims it is less likely to give incorrect or harmful answers.