The Gates Foundation has committed to spending at least US$1 billion over the next two years to expand access to artificial intelligence and AI-enabled solutions. This announcement was made as the Foundation launched its 10th annual Goalkeepers Report, which focused on the urgent actions needed to ensure that AI helps narrow gaps between the richest and poorest rather than widening them. The report, titled "Make This Matter: AI, Equity, and the Choice We Can't Delay," argues that AI's trajectory is not fixed and that there is a window to influence who benefits and how soon.
The Goalkeepers Report identified three areas where action now could help AI improve lives and livelihoods for more people in the years ahead. Firstly, making AI tools work in every language that people speak, as more than 90 percent of the data used to train early large language models comes from English-language sources. This leaves many communities that could benefit from AI poorly represented in the data on which these tools are built. The report also seeks to build AI tools for the contexts in which people will use them, requiring data and expertise from the places and populations they are intended to serve.
The report emphasizes that equitable access to the benefits of AI will not happen on its own and that AI tools must be built with the expertise of end-users. This will enable hundreds of millions of people who have not benefited from previous technology revolutions to access knowledge and advice. The Gates Foundation's funding will support partners already working to close the gaps in access to AI and ensure that AI tools reflect the knowledge and priorities of the people who need them most.
The Gates Foundation's commitment will help scale up the work of its partners over the next two years, with funding distributed across the foundation's priority areas. Forty percent of the funding will support education, focusing on areas like AI tutoring to help individualize student learning and teaching tools for use in US classrooms and abroad. Another 40 percent will go into supporting healthcare, from diagnostics and clinical decision-making support for frontline health workers to maternal and newborn care tools and the discovery of new drugs and vaccines.
The funding will also be allocated to agriculture, with 10 percent earmarked for helping smallholder farmers acquire AI-generated advice customized to their soil, weather, and crop conditions. An additional 10 percent will go into building the digital foundation that equitable AI depends on, including data sets in languages that the tools do not yet understand. The Foundation is also calling on others who share the goal of making AI more useful, accessible, and affordable to invest their resources and expertise.
According to Mr. Bill Gates, the Chairman of the Gates Foundation, the foundation was created partly to address a basic market failure, where people with the greatest needs often have the least power to shape the direction of innovation and investment. He emphasized that AI presents the same challenge, only at a much greater speed, and that left to the market alone, the most capable tools would be built first for the people and institutions that are most able to pay for them, rather than those who can benefit most.
The Gates Foundation's goal is to harness AI for good, but it emphasizes that this will not happen by accident. It will require a deliberate, specific commitment from government leaders and the companies developing the technology to measure success, not only by what AI can do for the most profitable users but by what it can do for the people who will benefit most. The Foundation's efforts aim to ensure that AI helps narrow gaps between the richest and poorest, rather than widening them.
Key points
- The Gates Foundation has committed US$1 billion to expand access to artificial intelligence and AI-enabled solutions over the next two years.
- The funding will be distributed across the foundation's priority areas, including education, healthcare, agriculture, and building the digital foundation for equitable AI.
- The report emphasizes that equitable access to the benefits of AI will not happen on its own and that AI tools must be built with the expertise of end-users.
