Google-backed AI startup Anthropic raises $100M from South Korea’s SK Telecom to take on ChatGPT

In May, we wrote Anthropic after the OpenAI rival raised a massive $450 million in funding with backing from Google Alphabet, making it the year’s largest AI funding round since Microsoft’s $1 billion investment in OpenAI in January.

Fast forward three months later, South Korea’s largest telecommunications company SK Telecom said on Sunday that it will invest $100 million into the Silicon Valley-based Anthropic to strengthen its telecommunications-driven AI business.

SK Telecom, which had previously made a smaller investment in May, said that the two companies plan to jointly build a robust AI platform and develop a large multilingual language model focused on global telecommunications, Reuters reported. However, SK Telecom chose not to disclose the specific amount of its investment in May or the extent of its ownership stake in Anthropic.

Anthropic came into the spotlight following the popularity of ChatGPT. Now Anthropic team has just released its own chatbot to take on ChatGPT, the popular chatbot developed by their former employer.

The popularity of OpenAI ChatGPT has now led to a boom in the adoption of generative artificial intelligence (AI) and big tech companies and small startups alike are in a race to integrate it into their products. Since its launch in November, ChatGPT has impressed many experts with its writing ability, software coding, proficiency in handling complex tasks, and its ease of use.

In May 2021, the startup raised $124 million in funding from high-profile investors led by Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn, with participation from former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, James McClave, Dustin Moskovitz, and the Center for Emerging Risk Research, among others.

Anthropic was founded in 2021 by OpenAI’s former VP of research Dario Amodei (CEO), Jack Clark, Sam McCandlish, and Tom Brown. Sensing that generative artificial intelligence is going to have a major impact on the world, Dario struck out with his sister Daniela to create “large-scale AI systems that are steerable, interpretable, and robust.” Before co-founding Anthropic, Daniela Amodei was OpenAI’s vice president of safety and policy.

Anthropic is working to build reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems. For now, the startup is primarily focusing on research towards these goals; down the road, we foresee many opportunities for our work to create value commercially and for public benefit, the company said on its website.

“This is definitely a big deal in the generative AI space,” said Ali Javaheri, an associate research analyst at PitchBook. It “shows that OpenAI is not the only player in the game, that it’s still a very competitive space,” he said.

In a blog post, Anthropic said: “Our team is focused on AI alignment techniques that allow AI systems to better handle adversarial conversations, follow precise instructions, and generally be more transparent about their behaviors and limitations.”