INDUSTRY // EDU. TECH
GSMA Foundry and Khalifa University to accelerate AI innovation with the development of TelecomGPT
The GSMA Foundry, the GSMA’ s innovation hub and Khalifa University of Science and Technology, a top-ranked higher education institution in the UAE, have announced a strategic co-operation agreement on the opening day of MWC Doha. The collaboration aims to advance research and innovation in telco AI through a shared commitment to knowledge exchange and Digital Transformation.
Khalifa University will work with the GSMA Foundry to develop specialised AI data assets, models and benchmarking frameworks for telecom applications, supporting the development of open, robust, safe and energy-efficient solutions for the industry.
In the first phase of this groundbreaking collaboration, the GSMA and Khalifa
University will release key Open Telco assets including TelecomGPT, an advanced telco-first AI large language model( LLM) with a chat interface hosted on LightOn and an Open Telco Knowledge Graph focused on 3GPP documentation, built using LightOn compute and hosted on Hugging Face. These assets are designed to accelerate the adoption of accurate, telecomspecific AI models across the industry.
The GSMA Open-Telco LLM Benchmarks show that even advanced general-purpose LLMs struggle with telecom-specific challenges when interpreting standards, troubleshooting networks and handling technical telecom knowledge. Together with Khalifa University’ s 6G Research Centre( 6GRC), the GSMA is committed to reducing this gap by improving model performance in telecoms to support the mobile ecosystem.
“ We are excited to embark on this forward-thinking collaboration with the GSMA, which marks a major step towards shaping the future of AI in telecommunications. By uniting Khalifa University’ s research strength with the GSMA’ s industry leadership, we are poised to set new benchmarks in AI model reliability and innovation,” said Professor Merouane Debbah, Director, 6G Research Centre, Khalifa University.“ Together, we aim to empower the region’ s Digital Transformation, accelerate scientific progress and ensure that telecom AI solutions are robust, trustworthy and ready for tomorrow’ s challenges.”
“ Thanks to our collaboration with Khalifa University, the mobile ecosystem stands to benefit from AI capabilities specifically designed for telecommunications, addressing critical areas such as managing network faults and supporting operational decision-making,” said Alex Sinclair, CTO, GSMA.“ This initiative is a testament to our commitment to safe and dependable solutions that help the industry advance towards fully AI-driven network operations.”
The GSMA Open-Telco LLM Benchmarks initiative was launched at MWC25 Barcelona and has grown into a collaborative platform for leading mobile network operators to experiment with and validate LLMs tailored to telecom applications. The community also features a leaderboard that highlights how various LLMs perform on telecomspecific use cases. The next phase of the community will broaden its scope to include holistic evaluation, such as energy efficiency, Time to First Token and task latency and assess both agents and models. �
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