GSMA Launches Open Telco AI for Telecom Networks

BARCELONA, Spain — The GSMA on Monday announced Open Telco AI, an industry initiative to develop artificial-intelligence models for telecommunications networks, at Mobile World Congress.

The program creates a centralized portal to provide access to telecommunications-specific AI models, datasets, and computing resources.

According to the GSMA, the initiative was established in response to limitations of general-purpose AI models, which have demonstrated limited capability in interpreting network data and automating operations.

The organization referenced internal data showing that 16% of generative AI deployments in the telecommunications sector have been applied to network operations.

AT&T and AMD are founding supporters of the initiative.

AT&T is releasing a series of open, hardware-agnostic models trained on publicly available data.

AMD is providing computing capacity for model training, fine-tuning, and evaluation through its GPU platforms and its cloud partner, TensorWave.

The portal contains a repository of open-weight models for tasks, including network troubleshooting and interpretation of technical standards.

Models available include RFGPT, a radio-frequency language model developed by Khalifa University, and the Large Telco Model (LTM), developed by AdaptKey AI using NVIDIA's Nemantron architecture.

To assess model performance, the GSMA introduced the Telco Capability Index, a benchmarking tool that evaluates AI systems using seven telecommunications-specific criteria.

The initiative's open data library includes knowledge graphs, embeddings, and fine-tuning datasets contributed by academic and corporate partners, including Huawei Technologies France, Purdue University, and Yale University. NVIDIA is supplying pipelines for generating synthetic data.

Louis Powell, director of AI initiatives at the GSMA, said existing AI models lack the precision required by the telecommunications industry and that common benchmarks are necessary before the technology can meet sector-specific regulatory and operational standards.

Representatives from AT&T and AMD stated that the collaboration aims to advance AI from general-purpose applications to telecommunications-grade performance, enabling operators to manage core and edge network environments more effectively.

Open Telco AI has more than 40 contributing partners and participants, including telecommunications operators China Mobile, Deutsche Telekom, SK Telecom, SoftBank, and Vodafone, as well as technology companies Google Cloud and IBM.