Sept. 15 (UPI) — The Gates Foundation, created by Microsoft creator Bill Gates, has pledged $1 billion over the next two years to expand access to artificial intelligence to work on social inequalities.
The Gates funding will be used to support AI projects in health care, agriculture and education, and to create data sets in more languages.
“The window to influence who benefits, and how soon, is short,” the foundation’s annual Goalkeeper’s Report argued.
Because most data that trained large language models was in English, the report said, it left “many communities that could benefit from AI poorly represented in the data on which these tools were built.”
“The Gates Foundation was created in part to address a basic market failure: the people with the greatest needs often have the least power to shape where innovation and investment go,” Gates, chair of the foundation, said in the report. “Much of our work has been about closing that gap. AI presents the same challenge, only at much greater speed. Left to the market alone, the most capable tools will be built first for the people and institutions most able to pay for them-not necessarily for those who could benefit most.”
The foundation will give the new funding to groups working on its priorities, such as encouraging AI use among doctors, farmers and teachers, or developing data sets in more languages.
“In terms of equity, AI will either be the greatest equalizer ever invented, or the worst source of injustice,” Gates wrote in an essay on his personal website last month. He said the transition to the AI era will be one of the “most turbulent times in human history.”
Gates warned that AI would cause job losses and leave little room for one industry to absorb the refugees from another.
“We can harness AI for good,” Gates wrote. “But it won’t happen by accident.”
In the past week, leaders in the AI industry have issued warnings about the rapid development of the technology, calling for a slow-down. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay over the weekend saying that AI developers risk “losing control of AI systems,” and urged developers to “pace” the technology’s advancement.
But President Donald Trump dismissed the efforts, calling it a “SICK conspiracy” to turn public sentiment against AI.
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