SK invests $100 mn in ChatGPT developer's rival Anthropic

South Korea’s SK Telecom Co. said on Sunday it has invested $100 million in the US startup Anthropic, a ChatGPT rival artificial intelligence developer, to build a partnership with the company.

With the investment, the two companies plan to co-develop a large multi-language model and AI platforms.

The investment follows the mobile carriers’ participation in Anthropic's Series C funding.

“This is more than a financial investment. We will build a strong strategic partnership with Anthropic,” said SK.

San Francisco-based Anthropic was established by former R&D employees of OpenAI, the ChatGPT developer.

Last May, Anthropic unveiled the beta version of a generative AI platform Claude. It is not yet available for public use, but is comparable to ChatGPT, according to industry observers.

Last February, Google invested $400 million in Anthropic.

Both SK Telecom and Anthropic will develop a large multi-language model primarily for Korean, English, German, Japanese, Arabic and Spanish languages.

SK Telecom has already developed its own large language model and Anthropic will offer a tool that fine-tunes SK’s large language model (LLM) and optimizes it by purpose.

GPT-3 developer and Anthropic co-founder Jared Kaplan will lead the development.

SK Telecom will sell the LLM to be co-developed by Anthropic as well as Anthropic’s Claud to Korean companies

Both companies will also cooperate to set up a global AI-based multi-language model with global telecom service providers.

Anthropic is one of four companies with which US President Joe Biden discussed the security and safety issues of AI technology in May of this year, along with Google, Microsoft and OpenAI.

Anthropic has the AI technology to minimize the harm generative AI may cause.

SK Telecom plans to lift its corporate value to more than 40 trillion won ($30 billion) by 2026.

(Corrected: The name of the company, in which SK Telecom invested $100 million, was corrected to Anthropic.)

Write to Ji-Eun Jeong at jeong@hankyung.com
 


Yeonhee Kim edited this article.