SK Telecom and Deutsche Telekom partner on telco-specific large language model
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SK Telecom and Deutsche Telekom partner on telco-specific large language model

Jon Abrahamson, Claudia Nemat, Tim Höttges (all Telekom) James Ryu, SG Chung (both SKT).jpg

SK Telecom (SKT) and Deutsche Telekom have announced plans to jointly develop a telco-specific large language model (LLM).

The LLM will be specially tailored to the requirements of digital assistants in customer service, making it easier to telecoms companies to deploy generative AI models in an efficient and accelerated manner.

This project follows the announced made this summer for the Global Telco AI Alliance, an initiative entered by Deutsche Telekom, e&, Singtel and SK Telecom. This LLM development is to be the first project.

“AI shows impressive potential to significantly enhance human problem-solving capabilities,” said Claudia Nemat, member of the board of management for technology and innovation at Deutsche Telekom.

“To maximise its use especially in customer service, we need to adapt existing large language models and train them with our unique data. This will elevate our generative AI tools."

Together, SKT and Deutsche Telekom will collaborate with AI companies such as Anthropic (Claude 2) and Meta (LLaMa2) to co-develop a multilingual LLM tailored to the needs of telcos.

“Through our partnership with Deutsche Telekom, we have secured a strong opportunity and momentum to gain global AI leadership and drive new growth,” said Ryu Young-Sang, CEO of SKT.

“By combining the strengths and capabilities of the two companies in AI technology, platform and infrastructure, we expect to empower enterprises in many different industries to deliver new and higher value to their customers.”

Both SKT and Deutsche Telekom have now signed a letter of intent (LOI) in Seoul for the joint development and the first version of this LLM is due to go live in the first quarter of 2024.

Once operational, the telco-specific LLM will provide a better understanding of customer inquiries about telecom services than general models.

One of the interfaces that will be the first to benefit from this development is Telekom Deutschland's Ask Magenta service bot.

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