Telecom Giants Launch 'Open Telco AI'
The GSMA, the global telecom industry body, has launched the "Open Telco AI" initiative. The project aims to help carriers pool resources and knowledge to develop their own carrier-grade AI, in an effort to close the innovation gap with big tech hyperscalers.
The initiative launched at Mobile World Congress 2026 with AT&T and chipmaker AMD as its founding supporters. More than two dozen other organizations have also joined, including Huawei, KDDI, Nvidia, Orange, SK Telecom, and Google Cloud. A key driver for the project is the poor performance of general-purpose AI on specialized telecom tasks. According to GSMA Intelligence, only 16% of generative AI deployments in the telecom sector have been applied to network operations, the industry's largest cost center. Tests reveal that general large language models from providers like Google and OpenAI can produce 30-40% incorrect responses when questioned on specific technical topics, such as 3GPP standards for radio access networks. This "performance gap" creates significant risks and limits progress in automating network functions. As part of the launch, AT&T is releasing a family of open-source, telco-specific AI models. AMD will contribute computing power for training and fine-tuning these models through its GPU platforms and a partnership with cloud provider TensorWave. The collaboration aims to create a definitive open-source hub for telco-specific models, data, and evaluation tools. A "Telco Capability Index" will be used to measure and track the performance of different AI models on an expanding set of industry-specific tasks.
