Anthropic PBC, a pioneering artificial intelligence startup and public-benefit corporation headquartered in the United States, has secured a significant investment of $100 million from SK Telecom, South Korea’s largest telecommunications company. This noteworthy collaboration comes as a result of Anthropic’s previous engagement with SK Telecom Venture Capital (SKTVC), the venture capital arm of SK Telecom situated in Silicon Valley.
Marking a strategic partnership milestone, SK Telecom and Anthropic have embarked on a joint endeavor to develop a large language model (LLM) tailored specifically for telecommunications. This collaboration aims to create a multilingual LLM capable of supporting various languages, including Korean, English, German, Japanese, Arabic, and Spanish.
The focus of the partnership is to integrate the multilingual LLM into the evolving Telco AI Platform, a dynamic project spearheaded by the Global Telco AI Alliance. By joining forces, SK Telecom and Anthropic are driving innovation and enhancing the capabilities of this AI platform for telecommunications.
Notably, Anthropic had previously secured a significant funding round earlier this year, amassing $450 million from notable investors such as Google, a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc., and Spark Capital. With this recent investment from SK Telecom, Anthropic’s total funding has now reached an impressive $1.5 billion as of July 2023.
Founded in 2021 by CEO Dario Amodei and his sister Daniela, who formerly held roles within the senior team at OpenAI, Anthropic is dedicated to constructing dependable AI systems and conducting research into the potential opportunities and challenges of AI technology.
Setting itself apart from OpenAI’s methodology, where reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is employed to enhance safety and minimize harm, Anthropic employs a distinct approach known as reinforcement learning from AI feedback (RLAIF). This feedback mechanism involves one AI model correcting another, guided by a set of predefined “rules or principles” referred to as “Constitutional AI” by Anthropic.