SK Telecom eyes June launch for its telco-focused LLM

SK Telecom Co., a major South Korean mobile carrier, said Tuesday it will release a large language model (LLM) tailored to the needs of telecommunications companies in June.

The telco-specific LLM was fine-tuned on SK Telecom’s artificial intelligence model, A.X, and various AI models developed by global big techs, including Open AI’s GPT and Anthropic’s Claude, according to the Korean company.

SK Telecom said its LLM will help global telcos use AI to better perform their tasks, such as operating customer centers and network infrastructure and recommending wireless plans to their users.

“It is difficult to suit the needs of telcos, which try to provide various services and solve their problems with just one general LLM,” said Eric Davis, vice president of language superintelligence labs at SK Telecom.

“SKT’s multi-LLM strategy aims to create a wide range of telco-LLM through fine-tuning and benchmarking, so they can be used for specific situations,” he added.

SK Telecom also unveiled its Intelligence Platform, where telecommunications companies can efficiently develop generative AI applications and use AI tools, including retrieval augmented generation and multimodal AI. Yonhap