By Michael Scott
The journey to rival OpenAI products in the artificial intelligence (AI) ecosystem became a reality for Antropic as it received $100M in funding from South Korea’s SK Telecom (SKT). The funding broadens the war chest for the AI startup after securing $100 million from the largest company within South Korean telecommunications.
SKT chief executive Ryu Young-Sang lauded allocating $100M towards the AI startup. He added that integrating the Korean language-based large language model (LLM) with Antropic’s AI capabilities yields the synergy SKT needs to gain leadership beneficial to its global telco partners.
SKT Invests $100M Besides Contribution in Antrhopic’s Series C Funding Round
The $100 million investment targets to facilitate the development of multilingual LLM customized to suit global telecommunications firms. The allocation comes after Antropic concluded a successful Series C funding round that realized $450 million.
SKT actively participated in the Anthropic Series C round, leveraging its investment unit SK Telecom Venture Capital (SKTVC). The round saw Google involvement as it has on previous occasions.
SKT-Anthropic partnership targets the creation of a multilingual LLM that will support English, Spanish, German, Arabic, Korean, and Japanese languages. Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei lauded the alliance as one to expedite the delivery of industry-specific LLMs.
The co-founder of the AI startup added that industry-specific LLMs harbor a high potential to deliver safer and more reliable channels to deploy AI technology reliably. Anthropic 2021 unveiled Claude 2021 as an AI system to streamline corporate tasks.
Claude Upgrade Yields Comparable Capabilities to GPT-3.5
Claude’s applications within the telecommunication sector involve streamlining customer services, interactive consumer applications, sales, and market operations. Its core infrastructure utilizes constitutional training making it less reliable when utilized in reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) techniques similar to OpenAI’s. Nonetheless, the models are theoretically less vulnerable to human biases.
Antropic funding by SKT comes days after it updated the Claude Instant bot to integrate version 1.2, considered cheaper though less powerful than the Claude 2. The upgrade grants Claude capabilities that are comparable to the GPT-3.5.
Claude Instant portrays significant advancement in AI technology. In particular, it can accommodate tokens of context exceeding a hundred thousand. Such portrays superior functionality that dwarfs OpenAI’s chatbots with reduced capability confined at 4K to 32K tokens of context.
Token involves the simple information unit that an LLM can handle. It differs from mere letters or words. For instance, ‘Humanoid’ has two tokens, ‘Medicine’ three, while ‘Cat’ represents a single token like ‘A.’
Anthropic unveiled Claude 2 in July, with the variant in the United Kingdom and the United States offering the general public an extended availability. Unlike predecessors, Claude 2 version grants accessibility via a beta website API. The increased accessibility broadens Anthropic’s user base.
SKT Collaboration With Anthropic Yields Supportive Channel to Drive AI-Powered Innovations
Amodei expresses enthusiasm for collaborating with SKT as it yields a platform to transform the telecommunications industry. He admitted that SKT’s investment in the startup AI firm portrays commitment to realizing artificial intelligence advancements within the telecommunications ecosystem.
Amodei considers the SKT-Antropic collaboration would bolster AI-driven innovations customized to fulfill the linguistic and market requirements. He considers the partnership as underscoring that AI could play a strategic input within the global telecommunication landscape.
The unveiling of Claude and utilization for LLMs makes Anthropic-SKT collaboration a critical investment in 2023. It coincides with when AI emerged as a vital topic in tech investor debates.
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