South Korean Telecom Major to Launch Telco-Specific LLM, to Monetize in 2024

South Korea's largest wireless carrier SK Telecom has partnered with global Big Tech firms, including OpenAI and Anthropic, to develop an LLM specializing in telecom terms. The company aims to launch the model later in June this year.

Derived from general-purpose LLMs such as ChatGPT and Claude, this Korean model will be adjusted to better understand user intent.

Eric Davis, VP of AI tech collaboration at SK Telecom, claimed that the new LLM would perform 35% better than GPT-4. The company’s CEO, Ryu Young-sang recently hinted that the telco-specific LLM services will be commercialized within this year.

The LLM would reduce the time taken to perform key tasks including customer consulting, marketing, legal services, and human resources, says Jeong Min-young, VP of the AI platform.

SK Telecom officials have disclosed that the telecommunications giant has embarked on a repetitive cycle of refining its model by feeding it vast amounts of communication-related data.

This iterative process involves fine-tuning between generic models and bespoke models, with a meticulous evaluation of the responses generated to inquiries. The goal is to ascertain the usefulness of these responses while identifying areas where the data may be lacking.

“Since it is never easy for a telecom company to solve various services and problems to provide with one general-purpose LLM, creating various telco-specific LLMs through fine-tuning and model evaluation processes and use according to a situation would be our multi-LLM strategy,” Davis said.

Following its domestic debut, SK Telecom plans to expand its portfolio globally by developing multiple LLMs and launching them in other languages, leveraging the Global Telco AI alliance.

Formed last year, this alliance aims to develop telecom-specific LLMs and related AI services, with members including Deutsche Telekom, Singtel Group, and SoftBank.