The GSMA launches an industry initiative to develop open, telco-specific AI models, with AMD and AT&T as founding partners, saying current models struggle with telco tasks.
The GSMA has today launched a global industry initiative called Open Telco AI, through which it hopes to foster open collaboration among operators, vendors, AI developers and academic institutions. The goal of the initiative, which counts AT&T and AMD as founding partners, is to accelerate the development of telco-grade AI.
Despite their rapid overall advancement, the GSMA claims that “frontier” AI models underperform on telco-specific tasks. Many of them struggle with network data interpretation, understanding standards documentation, or to “automate network operations with sufficient accuracy,” the association said.
“Open Telco AI launched by the GSMA is something that the telco industry has needed for at least a year. At IDC we see telcos calling out for more industry support and guidance on data standardization, data governance, and AI models that can be trusted to deliver accurate outcomes when used to support GenAI or agentic capabilities within networks,” IDC analyst Chris Silberberg told Light Reading in emailed comments.
AT&T and AMD were announced as founding partners for the initiative. The US telco is releasing “a family of open telco-models” that have been developed and trained on publicly available data. They were built to be hardware- and cloud‑agnostic and are intended to be useful for projects of varying sizes levels of available compute resources.
AMD is providing compute capacity for model training, fine‑tuning, inference and evaluation through its GPU platforms, cloud partner TensorWave and open toolchains.
The list of contributing partners also includes, among others, Huawei, KDDI, Nvidia, Orange, Ooredoo, SK Telecom, Softbank, Swisscom and Turkcell. Meanwhile, GSMA said the initiative also “has the support of valued participants” including China Telecom, China Unicom, China Mobile, Deutsche Telekom, Du, e& UAE, Google Cloud, IBM, Liberty Global, Telefónica and Vodafone.
Analyst Dean Bubley, of Disruptive Analysis, told Light Reading via email that the announcement sounded “well-intentioned” but that it was somewhat unclear how it would get translated into reality. “Firstly, it says it’s about telecom, but there’s a conspicuous absence of anything obviously non-mobile. There’s no mention of groups like Broadband Forum or WiFi alliance or TIP or WBA for instance,” he said.
“Next, how will this actually get trialled or implemented? Where’s the certification, training, test labs, dev program etc?” Bubley added.
Despite saying existing partnerships give it a “strong start,” Silberberg noted: “To have long term staying power we need to see stronger commitment from significant network vendors like Ericsson and Nokia, and engagement from additional cloud providers such as AWS and Microsoft Azure.”
Building blocks
The launch includes a new portal, which will support the co-creation of what the GSMA calls essential building blocks for the project. This comprises models designed for telecom tasks, including network troubleshooting and standards interpretation, such as a radio-frequency language model from Khalifa University.
Other building blocks are “open data,” or a library of knowledge graphs, embeddings and fine-tuning datasets of text, logs and curated standards material. Additionally, the portal will support access to compute and open toolchain for projects training and inferencing open models via AMD and TensorWave, and an assessment of model performance on telecom‑specific benchmarks.
“In the next 12 months at IDC we do see appetite from telcos to take a more active role in fine tuning and developing models for network operations, but also a recognition that this is no easy task. Network operations must be much more accurate than in customer service operations, as a critical network failure precipitated by an AI error could go on to impact multiple network customers from consumers to enterprises, whereas an error in resolving a billing inquiry could impact just one customer line item,” Silberberg added.
https://www.lightreading.com/ai-machine-learning/gsma-s-open-telco-ai-initiative-launches-with-at-t-amd-as-founding-partners
