Gates Foundation and 60 partners launch coalition to expand AI language data for underrepresented languages

The Gates Foundation has launched a coalition with 60 partners, including Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI Foundation, to improve AI accessibility for underrepresented languages. The initiative aims to reach over 3 billion people in five years by coordinating efforts to collect diverse language data. This follows a $1 billion commitment to AI-focused projects in health, education, and agriculture. The coalition addresses the problem of AI models trained on non-representative internet data, which can lead to harmful mistranslations. Partners like Google are collecting speech data in India, while Anthropic works to improve African language support.