SKT A-dot Surpasses 1 Million Users, Evolves as Conversational AI... Accelerates Overseas Expansion

SK Telecom is enhancing its artificial intelligence (AI) service A. (A-dot) and plans to launch the official service within this year. SKT aims to make this year the first year of its leap and transformation into an AI company, producing tangible results. Yoo Young-sang, CEO of SKT, stated, "Although AI technologies such as ChatGPT have recently emerged, a complete AI service that provides exactly what customers want has yet to appear," adding, "A. is an example of service commercialization of AI technology that may be unfamiliar to customers, with personalized characters, conversations, and service linkage as core elements."

SK Telecom's promotional model is using A.Dot.

Surpassing 1 Million Users, Expanding User Base

A. has evolved to the next level. The A. interface has been redesigned to allow users to view personalized content tailored to their preferences all at once on a single screen. Additionally, 'ChatT,' which uses the ChatGPT model, was added to create a dedicated AI chatbot conversation room where users can interact with characters. By adopting technology from Scatter Lab, a startup known for 'Iruda,' the emotional AI character 'A. Friends' was also introduced.

SKT unveiled A. to the public in May last year. SKT launched the A. beta service based on the Korean version of the massive AI model GPT-3. The focus was on delivering a familiar AI experience to customers. Earlier this year, SKT applied ‘long-term memory’ technology that remembers important information from users’ past conversations with A., and ‘image retrieval’ technology that simultaneously learns images and Korean text collected from various fields, enabling it to think and express itself similarly to humans. Within nine months of its launch, A. secured over 1 million subscribers.

SKT reorganized its structure to expand into overseas markets. The A. organization, previously directly under the CEO, was expanded into the 'AI Service Division' and the 'Global & AI Tech Division.' The AI Service Division is responsible for existing services such as A., while the Global & AI Tech Division handles partnerships with overseas collaborators. SKT plans to accelerate its overseas expansion by forming alliances with domestic and international AI companies to advance its technology.

Ranked 47th in the Global Supercomputer ‘Top 500’

SKT’s supercomputer 'Titan' ranked 47th in the global 'Top 500' supercomputer list in the first half of this year. This is the first time Titan has entered the top 50. Titan was ranked 85th in the first half of last year. The 'Top 500' foundation announces the global supercomputer performance rankings twice a year, in June and November, based on performance metrics. Titan recorded a computing performance of 14.24 petaflops (PFlop/s) per second based on Linpack performance. Its peak performance reached 16.39 petaflops per second, approximately 2.2 times higher than last year. One petaflop equals the speed of performing 1,000 trillion floating-point operations (a computer’s method of recognizing real numbers) per second. This is a figure that can complete calculations that would take 7 billion people 420 years in just one hour.

An SKT official explained, "Entering the top 50 demonstrates that SKT possesses world-class performance in supercomputing, which serves as the brain of massive AI." SKT plans to continue efforts to revitalize the global AI ecosystem market.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.