BARCELONA – #MWC24 – The founding members of the Global Telco AI Alliance, along with Japanese telco SoftBank, have unveiled plans during an SK Telecom-hosted press event here in Barcelona to establish a joint venture (JV) for the development of telco-specific large language models (LLMs).
SK Telecom (SKT), Deutsche Telekom (DT), e& and Singtel originally formed the alliance in July 2023, with plans for a generative AI LLM unveiled by SKT and DT in October 2023, and now SoftBank has joined the fold as the initiative moves to its next stage by forming a JV. Each of the partners will invest equally in the venture, though financial details have not been revealed.
The quintet’s plan is to design LLMs that can help telcos enhance their customer interactions by using digital assistants and chatbots. The models will initially be optimised for the Korean, English, German, Arabic and Japanese languages, while there are plans to encompass additional languages further down the line.
The joint venture will aim to deploy “innovative AI applications tailored to the needs of the Global AI Telco Alliance members in their respective markets, enabling them to reach a global customer base of approximately 1.3 billion across 50 countries,” according to SKT.
