Halfway through 2023, the capital market's enthusiasm for artificial intelligence has not diminished, but the logic has changed a little.
According to Crunchbase, Anthropic, one of OpenAI's main competitors, recently received $100 million in financing from South Korean telecommunications giant SK Telecom (SKT), following a $450 million Series C in May.
Despite its cautious strategy, its "Constitutional AI" Claude 2 conversational bot has attracted extremely much interest. According to Crunchbase, in the past 16 months, Anthropic has raised $1.5 billion, second only to OpenAI, and investors include Google, Salesforce Ventures, Zoom Ventures and other industry giants. However, this financing was a little different than usual.
Source: Anthropic website
It is reported that in this cooperation with SKT, Anthropic will combine its most advanced AI technology (including the Claude 2 chatbot) with SKT's deep industry knowledge in telecommunications and its own accumulation in Korean language models, and the main goal of this money is to build a customized large model of the telecommunications industry that supports Korean, English, German, Arabic and other languages, and fine-tune it according to practical application scenarios such as customer service, marketing and interactive dialogue SK Telecom's 5G and digital content business.
"SKT has ambitions to revolutionize the telecommunications industry with artificial intelligence, and we are excited to combine our AI expertise with SKT's industry experience to build a large-scale language model customized for the telecom industry. We believe that industry-specific big models have great potential for safer and more reliable AI deployments," said Dario Amodei, Founder and CEO of Anthropic.
In addition, SKT has formed the Global Telecom AI Alliance with Deutsche Telekom, telecommunications company e&(UAE) and Singtel Ltd., which has also developed a new Telco AI Platform. The alliance's vision for this new platform is to serve as the core foundation of a series of future AI services in the telecom industry, including existing service optimization, digital assistants, killer applications, and more. It is reported that once the fine-tuning of the industry model is completed, Anthropic will work with SKT to deploy it on this platform, and the four telecom companies in the alliance will use a customized version of Claude and quickly and efficiently build and deploy a series of applications and services for their respective markets and users.
As an important part of modern cities and even modern civilization, the telecommunications industry has the blessing of AI, intelligent services are only the starting point, and smart cities may be the end. From the cooperation between Anthropic and SKT, we also see the trend of vertical landing of AI large models and industrial cooperation. On the one hand, as a leading telecommunications company in the industry, SKT can access the most advanced artificial intelligence technology through cooperation with Anthropic, cultivate new business growth points, and empower core business transformation. On the other hand, Anthropic can leverage SKT's financial strength and more important industry experience and resources to accelerate the commercialization of technology, promote the implementation of large models in the telecom industry, and open up the Korean and Asian markets. This cooperation model in the AI+ industry allows AI startups to obtain stable financing support and industry knowledge, and also allows investment companies to seize the opportunity of technological innovation.
McKinsey's latest report estimates that generative AI will add $4.4 trillion a year to the global economy, a process that is undoubtedly advancing by reshaping industries.
Nowadays, the battle of large models has entered the second half, and the industry's attention to large models has changed from the initial algorithms and computing power to today's commercial space and application scenarios. Various players have entered, and the big model has reached the stage of answering how to land.
Throughout the future, AI will be integrated with industrial development, become part of enterprise products, services and business models, and become an important strategic resource to promote industrial innovation and even the overall leap of social and economic productivity.
In this context, the MIT Technology Review China AI+ Entrepreneurship Competition will hold the finals in Nanjing on September 16, focusing on the implementation of AI in the industry and the innovators who promote it. Based on MIT Technology Review's long-term attention and in-depth research on emerging technologies and their commercialization over the years, the competition selects three promising AI+ tracks in digital healthcare, intelligent manufacturing, and smart cities, gathers entrepreneurial talents in the field of artificial intelligence, gathers industrial capital and innovation achievements, sets off an AI innovation storm, and accelerates artificial intelligence into thousands of households and benefits thousands of industries.
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Resources:
https://venturebeat.com/ai/ai-startup-anthropic-gets-100m-to-build-custom-llm-for-telecom-industry/
https://baijiahao.baidu.com/s?id=1767092278898961004&wfr=spider&for=pc
https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/rXZ4_7rDBXM_dvtUuMGRyg
https://news.crunchbase.com/ai-robotics/anthropic-cash-raise-sk-teleco-goog/