SK Telecom is joining hands with AI search specialist Perplexity to challenge the domestic and international AI search market. By combining Perplexity’s technology and SKT’s know-how, they’re confident that they may gain a bonus within the fierce AI search competition.
SKT (CEO Yoo Young-sang) held a joint meeting with Perplexity on the SKT Tower Supex Hall on the 4th.
Perplexity is an AI startup founded in 2022 by CEO Aravind Srinivas, an OpenAI alumnus, and provides a conversational search engine service based on generative AI. It’s currently in service in over 50 countries world wide and processes over 230 million search requests per thirty days.
SKT recently announced that it would be integrating the Perplexity service through the ‘Adot 3.0’ reorganization.
Through this collaboration, they announced that they may construct a ‘Personal AI Agent (PAA)’. They explained that PAA is split into five stages: ▲natural language conversation ▲inference and data exploration ▲unit task performance ▲complex task performance ▲creative task performance, and that they’re currently working to finish stage 2.
As well as, the corporate recommend a technique called ‘Motion of Communication’, which mixes the communication capabilities of a telecommunications company with Perplexity’s search-specific technology.
In comparison with other AI searches, SKT emphasized that it might probably deeply understand the user’s intentions and preferences as a telecommunications company. It said that it would be a service that understands not only the content entered by the user, but in addition the ‘intention’.
It was announced that the AI search service will evolve from ‘Search’ to ‘Answer’. It explained that the time for searching information shall be minimized. It also said that each one answers provided by Perplexity can have their sources indicated to attenuate problems corresponding to hallucinations or copyright issues.
Recently, major domestic AI B2C firms corresponding to Naver and Luton have declared AI search competition. Because the user base of foreign chatbots corresponding to ChatGPT increases and monetization plans develop into visible, it’s predicted that full-scale AI search will take off.
In this example, the corporate has revealed its intention to realize a bonus by combining its telecommunications know-how with the most recent overseas technology.
SKT CEO Yoo Young-sang recently stated regarding the controversial data copyright issue, “There could also be some legal issues.” He said, “I believe we want to pay for what’s obligatory.”
Perplexity has recently been heavily criticized in the USA for not properly citing sources when citing news articles and for scrolling through AI learning data without permission. Because of this, in July, they announced a program to share profits with media (publishers), and announced that it could be implemented starting next quarter.
Nonetheless, it seems that they’ve not yet decided how they may reply to copyright issues in Korea. Srinivas Perplexity CEO also declined to comment intimately.
As a substitute, it said that promoting may very well be introduced to AI search domestically as well, by which case promoting revenue may very well be shared with publishers.
“SKT user data isn’t reflected in search results,” said CEO Yoo, adding that they only use data from the net.
The 2 firms also revealed their long-term cooperation plans. Currently, it’s in the shape of technical cooperation, but in addition they mentioned the opportunity of combining and charging for the services of the 2 firms after 2025. Additionally they expressed their intention to jointly advance into the worldwide market.
Meanwhile, on the symposium, the ‘Adot’ voice model equipped with a perplexity model is also seen.
At first, it was set to English input and Korean output, so when asked, “Who’s the best-looking Korean fencing gold medalist?”, it gave an odd answer, “Korean medalists on this Paris Olympics include Ahn Se-young (badminton).”
Nonetheless, when the identical query was uttered in a subsequent Q&A session with the English input-English output setting, it gave an accurate answer. When asked to translate the reply into Korean, it produced an accurate result.
Aravind CEO, who’s visiting Korea for the primary time, said, “SKT is the telecommunications company that’s introducing AI the fastest in Korea,” and “Korea is a crucial market in that it values speed, work efficiency, and data search.”
SKT CEO Yoo Young-sang said, “When expanding into the worldwide market in the longer term, some localization shall be obligatory by way of user experience (UX), etc.” He added, “As a telecommunications company, we are going to evolve right into a service that emphasizes accessibility and universality.”
Meanwhile, SKT emphasized that it would provide users with ‘Perplexity Pro’ free of charge for one 12 months. It also revealed that it’s considering ways to expand the service.
Reporter Jang Se-min semim99@aitimes.com
