From open-language datasets to responsible deployment, here’s how a new Gates Foundation-led coalition plans to close the AI language gap
The Gates Foundation is bringing together multiple organisations — including Anthropic, Microsoft, the World Bank Group, Google and the OpenAI Foundation — to form a new global coalition aimed at making artificial intelligence more accessible in underrepresented languages, the Foundation said in a release.
The coalition has set a five-year goal of reaching more than three billion people, and will spend the coming year jointly developing its governance framework, organisational structure and key workstreams.
Participating organisations will pool resources and expertise across four areas: building shared, safe open-language data infrastructure; developing benchmarks to track progress; turning language data into AI models and applications that developers can use; and ensuring responsible deployment while protecting privacy, consent and data sovereignty.
“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 today’s AI models to be able to use AI tools in their own language and voice,” the release stated.
The initial signatories span frontier AI labs, government ministries, philanthropic organisations, developers and implementation partners, contributing expertise across research, AI model development, funding and public policy. The coalition has also invited other organisations to join and contribute resources and expertise, with the Gates Foundation noting that participants will contribute according to their respective 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,” the Foundation said, adding that it “brings together organisations working across datasets, models, benchmarks, applications, and implementation to connect and accelerate those efforts around a shared goal.”
Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft and the Gates Foundation, said the Foundation had initially hoped to bring together 10 organisations but ultimately secured participation from 60. Speaking to CBS News, he said: “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.”
Gates also pointed to the need to manage AI’s risks 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 health…those are very regulated areas…and we won’t get the good stuff very quickly unless we also engage with that,” he said.
Describing AI as fundamentally different from earlier technologies, Gates said, “This technology is not like other technologies,” adding, “AI is almost an evolutionary event.”
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