SKT, U.S. AI unicorn Perplexity to team up on search engine, LLMs

Korea's largest telecom has formed a partnership with AI startup Perplexity to offer subscribers a year of free access to the pro version of the U.S. firm's AI-powered search engine.

SK Telecom CEO Ryu Young-sang, left, and Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas pose for a photo before a press event held at SK Telecom's headquarters in central Seoul on Wednesday. [SK TELECOM]

Users of SK Telecom, Korea’s largest mobile carrier, will have free access to the pro version of the AI-powered search engine Perplexity AI for a year thanks to a partnership formed between SK Telecom and U.S. AI startup Perplexity that aims to expand their influence in foreign markets.

The telecom company touted Perplexity as a company that became a unicorn in less than two years since its establishment in 2022, utilized by tech billionaires such as Jensen Huang and Michael Dell.

Perplexity AI also topped the overall AI chatbot performance ranking as evaluated by the Wall Street Journal, beating out competitors like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude and Microsoft’s Copilot.

“What Perplexity does here is take your query, break it down into pieces, go read like tens or hundreds of the pages that are relevant to it, and come back to you with a very succinct summary, well formatted with charts, images and so on,” said Perplexity founder and CEO Aravind Srinivas at a press event held at SKT’s headquarters in central Seoul on Wednesday.

Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas, introduces its AI-powered search engine Perplexity AI at a press event held at SK Telecom's headquarters in central Seoul on Wednesday. [SK TELECOM]

Stressing his AI's focus on accuracy, the CEO drew a comparison to competitors, mentioning mistakes such as telling users to stick cheese to pizza using glue.

"We actually just make sure to use highest quality sources to give you a really well synthesized answer. And not only that, we give you sources to every single question, every single answer that we serve. That builds trust in the product," he said.

Srinivas believes Korea to be an important market for service expansion, having seen “a good usage” of Perplexity AI in the country.

“Korea shares this spirit of moving fast and saving time, being curious and always wanting to adopt new technology really quickly,” Srinivas added.

SK Telecom announced a $10 million investment in Perplexity in June to jointly develop an AI search engine optimized for Korean users to enhance its personal AI assistant service.

The U.S.-based startup, in turn, will be making a sizable investment in SKT’s U.S. subsidiary based in Silicon Valley, known as the Global AI Platform Corporation, although financial terms have yet to be outlined.

The mobile carrier has been at the forefront of the global AI race among domestic telecom companies, advancing its personal AI assistant service known as A. to transition to an AI company.

SK Telecom's CEO Ryu Young-sang speaks at the press event to introduce SK Telecom and Perplexity's partnership at SK Telecom's headquarters in central Seoul on Wednesday. [SK TELECOM]

SKT aims to release beta version of A. in the U.S. within the year, with assistance from Perplexity.

The market size of AI chatbots is forecast to grow an average of 24.9 percent annually to reach $49.9 billion by 2030, according to market tracker Market and Market.

The telecom's service surpassed 5 million subscribers by the end of August, making headlines in the local news for its convenient features such as enabling phone recording on iPhones and providing real-time translations during calls. Through the latest update, A. users can access seven large language models (LLMs), including Perplexity, SK Telecom’s in-house LLM A.X, ChatGPT and Claude.

The LLMs will be accessible for free for the time being, but the company is deliberating the possible monetization of A. features in the future.

“The services do need to be transitioned to a paid model in the future, but as of now, we are focusing on familiarizing and expanding AI features,” SK Telecom CEO Ryu Young-sang said. “We need to keep track of what kind of features are popular and need advancement, and when we are certain that it has become an attractive product in the market, that’s when we will consider monetization.”

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