Gates Foundation Pledges $1 Billion to Combat A.I. Inequality

The Gates Foundation has pledged to spend at least $1 billion over the next two years to expand global access to artificial intelligence and use it to tackle social inequalities. The foundation’s annual Goalkeepers report advocated an urgent effort to ensure that A.I. “helps narrow gaps between the richest and poorest rather than widening them.” The funding will be used to support A.I. projects in health care, agriculture and education, and to develop data sets in more languages. “The window to influence who benefits, and how soon, is short,” the report argued. If A.I. keeps developing as it is, “the most capable tools will be built first for the people and institutions most able to pay for them,” according to the report, “not necessarily for those who could benefit most.” Most of the data used to train the early large language models was in English, according to the report, “leaving many communities that could benefit from A.I. poorly represented in the data on which these tools were built.” The foundation said that it would divide the new funding among external groups working on its priorities, spanning work like encouraging A.I. use among doctors, farmers and teachers, or developing data sets in more languages. Though significant, the funding is a small fraction of the hundreds of billions of dollars at the disposal of commercial A.I. firms.