These pioneering companies are working together to develop models for AI

Five telcos have inked a pact to build large language models (LLMs) customized to meet the needs of their industry as well as support multiple languages. The efforts will be driven by a new joint venture to be established by the telcos, comprising South Korea's SK Telecom, Germany's Deutsche Telekom, Abu Dhabi's e& Group, Singapore's Singtel, and Japan's SoftBank. Collectively, the telcos have a global customer base of 1.3 billion across 50 markets, according to a joint statement released Monday. Also: Want to work in AI? How to pivot your career in 5 steps The new entity will be set up this year and develop LLMs designed specifically to enhance telcos' engagement with customers through digital assistants and chatbots. These artificial intelligence (AI) models will be optimized for languages used in the telco's domestic markets, including German, Japanese, Arabic, Korean, and English, as well as others, such as Bahasa Indonesia, so the models can be rolled out in Southeast Asia.