Gates Foundation forms global AI coalition to bridge language gap; Anthropic, Microsoft, Google among signatories

With a five-year goal of reaching more than three billion people, this coalition will jointly develop its governance framework, organisational structure and key workstreams over the next year.

The participating organisations will pool their resources and expertise across four areas: building shared and safe open-language data infrastructure, developing benchmarks to track progress, turning language data into AI models and applications accessible to developers, and ensuring responsible deployment while protecting privacy, consent and data sovereignty, Gates Foundation said in the release.

A group of 60 signatories are uniting behind a shared five-year goal: for an estimated 3.4 billion people who speak languages currently underrepresented in todays AI models to be able to use AI tools in their own language and voice, the release read.

The initial signatories span frontier AI labs, government ministries, philanthropic organisations, developers and implementation partners, bringing expertise across research, AI model development, funding and public policy.

Further, the coalition has also invited other organisations to join the initiative and contribute resources and expertise.

Gates Foundation further added that the Participating organizations will contribute according to their respective expertise and capabilities.

This commitment builds on years of work across the global AI ecosystem to improve language and voice capabilities and make AI more useful to people who speak underrepresented languages, Gates Foundation said, adding It brings together organizations working across datasets, models, benchmarks, applications, and implementation to connect and accelerate those efforts around a shared goal.

Reflecting on the coalition, Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft and the Gates Foundation said he Foundation had initially hoped to bring together 10 organisations but ultimately secured participation from 60.

In an interview with CBS News, he noted, We hope to get 10 organizations working with the Gates Foundation on this for with ambitious goals. We got 60 and so now we're going to accelerate how everyone's language will be in the AI and we'll have benchmarks that talk about the quality, you know, when I talk about my farming or about my school.

He also highlighted the need to address the risks associated with AI while accelerating its benefits in areas such as education and healthcare.

What we need to do is minimize these risks, the bad stuff bioterrorism, job loss and many of the good things like how should it be used in education or healththose are very regulated areasand we won't get the good stuff very quickly unless we also engage with that, he added.

Calling AI fundamentally different from previous technologies, Gates said, This technology is not like other technologies, stressing, AI is almost an evolutionary event. (ANI)