SK Telecom believes it will have its first telco-specific large language model (LLM) ready for action by June, and has developed what it calls an ‘intelligence platform’ that can be used for the development of generative AI (GenAI) applications for the telecom sector.
The South Korean operator has been working on what it calls its “multi-LLM strategy” since last summer to develop generative AI systems that are fine-tuned for specific purposes and can be used by different teams within a telco: The operator’s chief AI global officer, Suk Geun Chung, spoke with TelecomTV at Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2024 in Barcelona about the development and other AI matters.
The operator, which has been positioning itself as an AI company since 2022, has been training its LLMs with data relevant to the South Korean telecom sector, including terminology, rate plans and contracts, subsidies and offers and AI ethics: For this process it has been using its own LLM, dubbed A.X, as well as OpenAI’s GPT-4 platform and the Claude LLM from Anthropic (in which SK Telecom has invested).
To train the LLMs, SKT has been collecting telecom data, and selecting and purifying unstructured and structured data, which is put through a “human feedback-based reinforcement learning (RLHF)” cycle and then evaluated through a final benchmarking process, it noted in this announcement (in Korean).
