Bill Gates said, during the "Goalkeepers" event organized by his foundation, that combining "increased generosity" with "smart use of AI" could accelerate efforts to combat inequality, calling on the world's wealthiest countries to increase international aid and direct AI technologies toward what he described as "life-saving innovations."
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Gates, the foundation's chairman, said during a conversation held Monday with political commentator Van Jones at the Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York: "We've failed to embed the right human values, and the means to ensure our ethical rules remain in control of what these AI systems do."
The Gates Foundation's annual event, typically held to coincide with the United Nations' high-level meetings, opened with a reminder that 26 of the world's 34 wealthiest countries reduced their development aid to poorer nations over the past year.
At the same time, the United Nations has warned that progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals, which include reducing poverty, improving health, and protecting the environment by 2030, remains "slow and uneven."
This decline comes at a time when Gates said the world possesses "some of the best innovations ever to emerge for improving people's lives."
The foundation dedicated a large part of its two-hour event to highlighting teachers, farmers, and healthcare workers using AI to identify students' educational gaps, combat the spread of agricultural pests, and improve retrieval of patients' medical records.
The Gates Foundation also highlighted a new coalition including Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and dozens of other institutions, aiming to make AI more accessible to languages underrepresented in digital data.
The coalition includes 60 entities, according to Monday's announcement, including advanced AI labs, companies, charitable organizations, and other bodies already working to increase the number of languages available in AI tools that the Gates Foundation believes could help combat inequality globally.
The coalition aims to reach more than three billion people within five years, by better coordinating existing efforts.
Mark Suzman, CEO of the Gates Foundation, said this work must continue "at maximum speed," even as some of the largest AI companies call for slowing the development of advanced models.
He added that governments should regulate AI's effects in areas such as cybersecurity and child development, alongside expanding its humanitarian uses to reach poor communities still "excluded" from benefiting from this technology.
Suzman told the Associated Press: "Even if AI development stopped right now, which I don't expect and don't call for, we would still want to build these language datasets and make them usable with the tools currently available to us."
This collaboration comes after last week's "Goalkeepers" report, in which the foundation pledged to dedicate one billion dollars to AI-focused efforts aimed at improving health outcomes, developing educational tools, and providing better information to smallholder farmers around the world.
The report warned that underrepresentation of languages in data could lead to serious translation errors.
It gave the example of a pregnant woman in Malawi who says in her language that "the birth water has come down," where an AI model might translate the phrase literally and incorrectly as meaning she "threw the water away."
E.M. Lewis-Jong, CEO of Mozilla's data collective, said the "original sin" lies in the fact that many AI tools were trained on language data scraped from the internet.
Her company was launched with support from the Mozilla Foundation before becoming a subsidiary of the nonprofit Mozilla organization.
The data-sharing platform seeks to help communities upload their cultural and linguistic collections on their own terms, rather than having that data taken from the internet without their explicit consent.
Lewis-Jong said: "The internet is not a representative space. So why would you think you'd get a culturally and representationally diverse system if it was trained largely on content from Reddit?"
Details of how the coalition will be managed are still being worked out, according to Suzman.
A secretariat is set to be established to track each signatory's commitments, and the Gates Foundation may step in to encourage partners to close larger gaps when needed.
Google is taking part in the coalition, and has funded a project to collect more than 150,000 hours of audio recordings from all regions of India.
The project is known as "Fani," and highlights the importance of collecting voice data that includes different dialects within a single language, according to James Manyika, senior vice president at Google.
Manyika said the company is working with local partners to record voices on the ground to achieve this.
Anthropic, whose CEO published an essay calling for industry-wide cooperation to slow the pace of AI progress, was already working with the Gates Foundation to accelerate vaccine development and enhance its chatbot's data on local crops.
Elizabeth Kelly, who oversees beneficial-use operations at Anthropic, acknowledged that the company's products "still lag in supporting many African languages in particular."
She told the Associated Press: "We're well aware that we won't be able to achieve any of the benefits we want, whether in improving patient outcomes or raising literacy and numeracy levels among students around the world, unless we properly address the issue of language."
Resource: Al-Ghad.
