Anthropic's $100M Boost: SK Telecom Investment Unlocks AI Potential

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1:03intelligence startup essentially has received this and they announced this just on sunday so the funding comes this is just three months after anthropic raised a massive 450 million dollars series c which was led by spark capital and sqt initially participated in that financing through its vc arm sk telecom venture capital but last month a german software firm sap also joined Anthropics cap table and invested in them. So this is kind of interesting because Anthropic, while it is one of the most highly funded AI startups, appears to just continue to gobble up money. Right. Just last month, SAP invested.

1:49Now we're having this new hundred million dollars. It wasn't that long ago. They did 450. And I think this is really interesting as, you know, the founders have said it's going to take a billion dollars to really train and create what they're really after, or maybe tens of billions. So it's going to be very interesting. With this fresh cash infusion, SKT is jumping into this whole red-hot generative AI space, and the teleco says it will work with Anthropic to customize a multilingual large language model for global telecoms. This is very, very interesting. They obviously see a powerful use case that they would be able to unlock that perhaps others won't.

2:30And that I believe is why they're jumping into this. And similarly, you know, when we see companies like SAP pile on, I believe, you know, SAP sees use cases for Anthropic that they just won't be able to get. And the thing about this is, you know, while a lot of people might say, hey, but what about OpenAI? They're the market leader here open ai is kind of off the table to be honest right they've taken 10 billion dollars from microsoft and microsoft owns half the company aka has full control so microsoft's not going to allow anyone to invest in open ai that company is off the table it's essentially bought and sold it's done no one else is putting money into open ai um and microsoft is going to ensure that it is you know the premier leading uh chat chat gpt um ai company now that leaves a lot of other companies with a lot of cash around the world looking at their options and anthropic looks like a very promising option for a lot of these companies to put money into because this is one that has been going for quite a long time a lot of people don't know anthropic was famously funded by ftx who led one of their rounds sam bankman free who's now going to prison for fraud in his crypto company in his crypto exchange and so this is very very interesting so anthropic co-founder and chief science officer jared kaplan is going to spearhead the development and says um well i think essentially the ceo of anthropic which is dario armadi he said skt has incredible ambitions to use ai to transform the teleco industry we're excited to combine our ai expertise with skt's industry knowledge so i think the jointly ventured llm will support english korean german japanese arabic and spanish and it's going to enable skt and three other telcos in the global telco ai alliance that's dutch telecom e and and sigtel to essentially offer localized ai products so founded back in 2021 anthropic is building um their their assistant if you don't know it's called clod and essentially it is a chai gpt rival and clod aims to really help corporations automate workflows code process text and more with natural language processing and to be honest um i use clod all the time um i'm a big fan of chai gpt that's probably my most my my staple it was kind of the first one i got on but you can use clod anyone can use clod for free if they go to poe.com and there's a couple different options there is clod instant and then they just released Claude 2 which has a whole bunch of new features and is more similar to GPT-4 in my opinion and the thing that I absolutely love about Claude that you're not going to see with ChatGPT is ChatGPT if you put in too much content it will say like hey you know that message is too big try shortening it Claude does not have that issue and so when I'm creating you know when I'm writing articles or doing other things I can essentially go and like for for example for a podcasts like this sometimes I get I'll put like in Claude I'll put like 10 different articles written about a specific company and say hey give me some bullet point takeaways that you think are extra relevant and interesting today in light of like a news story I'm going to talk about and it's going to be able to go through all 10 of those articles and give me takeaways that's something Chai Chibu just can't do and so or at least in one shot anyway so I think this is a really powerful use case and Claude is a great little tool that Anthropic is building just recent news was the fact that Anthropic and Claude have just released you know this new Claude 2 or I guess Claude Instant 1.2 which is an updated version and incorporates a lot of the strengths of its next gen Claude 2 into Claude Instant which is just a lot faster.

6:14So they're definitely making a lot of moves as far as as far as development. So use cases for telecoms I think could include customer service, marketing, sales, and also customer applications. That's according to SKT. And the Korean giant, I think, really aims to blend its own language model with Anthropics capabilities to gain a bit of an edge here. So this is what they actually said. They said, combining our Korean language-based LLM with Anthropics' strong AI capabilities, we expect to create synergies and gain leadership in the AI ecosystem with our global telco partners. And that was actually SKT's CEO, who is Ryan Yong-seng.

6:59And so I think this really goes straight to the top of their company, to the very top, to their CEO. This is something they're very interested and very focused on. I think the strategic investment really represents Anthropik's continued momentum and also just rising interest in generative AI across a lot of different industries as one of OpenAI's original backers. And I think that SKT is really betting big that custom LLMs will be a key competitive advantage into the future. So I think this is very interesting. And I think this is interesting in spite of the fact or in light of the fact that actually Claude is making, Anthropik is making some really big moves with Claude.

7:38And so I think this is definitely a company we're going to want to continue following in the future and seeing how they evolve with so many different companies investing heavily inside of them.