The Gates Foundation has pledged to spend at least $1 billion over the next two years to expand global access to artificial intelligence and use it to tackle social inequalities.
The foundation’s annual Goalkeepers report, released on Monday, advocated an urgent effort to ensure that A.I. “helps narrow gaps between the richest and poorest rather than widening them.”
The funding will be used to support A.I. projects in health care, agriculture and education, and to develop data sets in more languages.
“The window to influence who benefits, and how soon, is short,” the report argued.
If A.I. keeps developing as it is, “the most capable tools will be built first for the people and institutions most able to pay for them,” according to the report, “not necessarily for those who could benefit most.”
Most of the data used to train the early large language models was in English, according to the report, “leaving many communities that could benefit from A.I. poorly represented in the data on which these tools were built.”
The foundation said that it would divide the new funding among external groups working on its priorities, spanning work like encouraging A.I. use among doctors, farmers and teachers, or developing data sets in more languages.
Bill Gates, the billionaire co-founder of Microsoft and the chairman of the Gates Foundation, has warned that A.I. could pose a grave threat to jobs and human life. “In terms of equity, A.I. will either be the greatest equalizer ever invented, or the worst source of injustice,” he wrote in an essay on his personal website last month, predicting that the transition to the new A.I. era would be one of the “most turbulent times in human history.”
According to Mr. Gates, who no longer works at Microsoft, the tech industry is knowingly downplaying threats posed by A.I., because there is so much money on the line.
The Gates Foundation’s announcement came after the chief executive of Anthropic called for a global slowdown of A.I. development after one of the company’s employees quit over concerns about the safety of the technology. Top executives at other major A.I. companies, including Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI; Elon Musk, who founded SpaceXAI; and Demis Hassabis, the chair of Google DeepMind agreed on the need for a slower pace.
Last month, Mr. Gates warned that A.I. would spread across the economy, possibly causing job losses across the economy and leaving little room for one industry to absorb the refugees from another. The biggest tech companies in the world, including Microsoft, are racing to help corporate customers adopt A.I., and have said it could replace many workers.
On Monday, Mr. Gates urged the governments and companies developing the technology to focus on how A.I. could help people who have most to gain from the technology, rather than the most profitable users.
“We can harness A.I. for good,” Mr. Gates wrote. “But it won’t happen by accident.”
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