SKT, Deutsche and SoftBank to form joint AI venture

The telecommunications giant will join Japan's Softbank, Germany's Deutsche Telekom and Singapore's Singtel to develop large language models.

SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won, fourth from left, and SK Telecom CEO Ryu Young-sang, second from right, pose for a photo with other executives from global telecommunications companies to announce the formation of a joint venture aimed at developing telecom-tailored large language models at Mobile World Congress 2024 in Barcelona on Monday. [SKT]

SK Telecom, the country's largest wireless carrier, will form a joint venture with Japan's SoftBank, Germany's Deutsche Telekom, Singapore's Singtel and United Arab Emirates' e& to jointly develop large language models (LLMs) tailored to the needs of telecom services.

SoftBank is the latest in line to join the companies’ move to create their own LLMs designed to help the telecom giants primarily improve customer interactions via digital assistants and chatbots, an initiative born out of Global Telco AI Alliance launched in July.

The scale of the investment or proportion of the stake that each company holds over the joint venture was not disclosed.

The formation of the joint venture was announced on Monday in a meeting held at Mobile World Congress 2024 (MWC 2024) currently taking place in Barcelona.

The meeting was attended by SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won, SK Telecom CEO Ryu Young-sang, Deutsche Telekom CEO Tim Höttges, e& Group CEO Hatem Dowidar, Singtel Group CEO Yuen Kuan Moon, and SoftBank’s Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) Tadashi Iida.

The goal is to develop multilingual LLMs optimized for thee Korean, English, German, Arabic and Japanese languages, with plans to add others under agreement among the founding members.

“We as telcos need to develop tailored LLM for the telco industry to make telco operations more efficient, which is a low-hanging fruit,” said SK Telecom’s Ryu in a statement. “Our ultimate goal is to discover new business models by redefining relationships with customers. The Global Telco AI Alliance brings synergy to its members by allowing them to achieve more by working as a team.”

The joint venture and the development of LLMs have the potential to tap into a global customer base of some 1.3 billion users across 50 countries when combining the markets of five companies.

SK Telecom has been consistently pushing to expand investment in AI, aiming to reach annual revenue of 25 trillion won ($19 billion) by 2028 from the hyped technology.

BY LEE JAE-LIM [lee.jaelim@joongang.co.kr]