San Francisco-based Artificial Intelligence (AI) startup, Anthropic, has announced the raise of $100 million in funding from one of the largest mobile operators in South Korea, SK Telecom.
SK Telecom, which earlier made an investment in Anthropic in May, disclosed that the two companies aim to develop a global telecommunications-oriented multilingual large language model (LLM) and build an AI platform.
The LLM which SKT and Anthropic will jointly develop would allow four Global Telco AI Alliance members which include, e& and Singtel, Deutsche Telekom, to offer AI developments customized to their users in each market. The LLM would support English, Korean, German, Japanese, Arabic, and Spanish languages.
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Commenting on the recent funding, CEO of SKT Ryu Young-sang said in a statement,
“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”.
Founded in 2021, Anthropic is building an AI system called Claude, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, that enables corporations to manage tasks, including searching, generating answers, automating workflows, coding, and processing text in natural conversations.
Like OpenAI, Anthropic also has big tech backing. By late 2022, Anthropic had raised US$700 million in funding, out of which US$500 million came from Alameda Research.
In February 2023, Google’s cloud division followed with an investment of US$300 million for a 10% stake, in a deal requiring Anthropic to buy computing resources from Google Cloud.
In May 2023, Anthropic raised US$450 million in a round led by Spark Capital. This brought the startup’s valuation to roughly $5 billion.
In July this year, the Google-backed AI startup released its updated version, Claude 2, its second-generation AI chatbot.
The Claude 2 comes with an improved performance, longer responses, and can be accessed via API as well as a new public-facing beta website, claude.ai. Anthropic has made improvements from its previous models on coding, math, and reasoning.
For example, Claude 2 scored 76.5% on the multiple-choice section of the Bar exam, up from 73.0% with Claude 1.3. When compared to college students applying to graduate school, Claude 2 scored above the 90th percentile on the GRE reading and writing exams, and similarly to the median applicant on quantitative reasoning.
It is worth noting that Anthropic Claude models are seen as major competitors to OpenAI’s GPT-4. The startup goal is to make fundamental research advances that will let the company build more capable, general, and reliable AI systems that deploy these systems in a way that benefits people.
Anthropic has said it will focus on research into increasing the safety of AI systems. Specifically, the company is focusing on increasing the reliability of large-scale Al models, developing the techniques and tools, to make them more interpretable, and building ways to more tightly integrate human feedback into the development and deployment of these systems.