The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is distributing $5 million to 48 recipients across the Global South, as part of a programme aimed at developing AI-based applications built on large language models dedicated to solve local problems across health, agriculture and education. 

Each grantee will be awarded $100,000 each. They include researchers developing a ChatGPT-based chatbot to create and manage detailed electronic medical records for maternal healthcare workers in Pakistan, to an entrepreneur working on an AI tutoring tool to offer specialised education to students in Kenya. 

A majority of recipients are working on critical healthcare issues, such as HIV risk assessment, prenatal care and antibiotic prescriptions. 

Recipients are more often than not responding to local problems. One group of scientists in Uganda plan to use the funds to build a ChatGPT-based application to provide farmers with information about crop diseases. Scientists are planning to build a dataset in the native Luganda language to better assist farmers.  

A researcher in Vietnam is creating a chatbot to help advise residents in an area affected by saltwater intrusion, by fine tuning GPT-4 with data provided in Vietnamese. While in Brazil, a nonprofit organisation plans to develop a support bot for psychologists and lawyers helping women who have faced gender-based violence. 

“Too often, advances in technology deliver uneven benefits in many parts of the world due to existing patterns of discrimination, inequality, and bias,” said Kenyan computer scientist Juliana Rotich, who is part of the foundation’s AI safety committee. “Most of the tools being developed in the Global North are using data from lower-resourced regions that is often incomplete or inaccurate.” 

The importance of AI in local language for non-English speakers and those without basic technology is a core part of the programme.  

Researchers must go through unfiltered public data, understand factual inaccuracies and look through racial and gender biases 

To address this concern, the foundation says it has created a support hub of global AI experts to guide the grantees in assessing potential risks. 

The Gates Foundation has an endowment of just under $50 billion, annually spends around $5 billion, and employs over 1,600 people. 

The Gates Foundation has poured support into global health initiatives, vaccine development, and pandemic relief, making them indispensable to the world’s effort to fight the health crisis. 

All of the foundation’s wealth, personnel and power is controlled by its three trustees: Bill, Melinda, and Warren Buffet. 

Shafi Musaddique is news editor at Alliance magazine.