Some of the solutions have proven beneficial to rural women
farmers and business owners in Nigeria who receive critical financial advice
through a voice-to-text interface of the AI-enabled LLMs, the foundation said
in a statement Wednesday.
Each grant recipient will receive up to $100,000 to advance
its research project, for a total of $5 million in grants. The findings of
these projects will be shared at the Grand Challenges Annual Meeting in Dakar,
Senegal, this October.
The announcement follows an overwhelming response to the
Gates Foundation’s most recent Grand Challenges request for proposals.
Guided by the goal of reducing global inequity, the call for
proposals specifically targeted researchers and innovators in LMICs.
According to the foundation, responsible and safe use of
AI-driven LLM technology has the potential to help solve some of the world’s
toughest health and development challenges.
However, for these models to be useful in LMICs, researchers
in LMICs need to participate in the design, application, and testing of this
technology as it rapidly evolves.
A robust evidence base will fill gaps in access and our
knowledge about the application of such tools to address problems across LMICs
in an equitable way.
“Too often, advances in technology deliver uneven benefits
in many parts of the world due to existing patterns of discrimination,
inequality, and bias,” said Juliana Rotich, co-founder of iHub, an incubator
for Nairobi’s young technology entrepreneurs and who has agreed to serve on the
foundation’s new AI Ethics and Safety Advisory committee.
“AI is no different, with most of the tools being developed
in the Global North using data from lower-resourced regions that is often
incomplete or inaccurate. To realize the full potential of AI, it must be
developed responsibly and ethically, with the needs of the end user in mind.
Solutions can be transformative when they are locally inspired.”
The announcement is part of the foundation’s Grand
Challenges program, a family of initiatives fostering innovation to solve
pressing global health and development problems.
The foundation received more than 1,300 proposals, more than
80 per cent of which were from LMICs, within two weeks of posting its request
for proposals.
The nearly 50 selected projects from 17 LMICs are aligned
with the foundation’s goal of fostering a global innovation ecosystem in places
where it will have the most impact.
“The vibrant energy, boundless creativity, and unwavering
commitment from innovators to tackle the most vexing challenges has sparked a
wave of interest and excitement in the positive impact AI can have in the lives
of the vulnerable,” said Zameer Brey, interim deputy director for Technology
Diffusion at the Gates Foundation.
“These local innovators are harnessing the seismic power of
AI and LLMs in ways that can be paradigm-shifting for their local communities
and beyond. We believe the most impactful technological advancements include
those that begin and end with the people they affect most.”
Prompted by Grand Challenges to build upon existing
technologies, researchers will work to address a wide range of health and
development challenges throughout LMICs.
Examples include how LLMs can help frontline health workers
in India, where one woman dies every 20 minutes in childbirth, improve the
management of high-risk pregnancies; tailor agricultural advice to individual
smallholder farmers in Uganda, who are exposed to the devastating effects of
crop diseases and pests; provide teacher coaching to improve educational
outcomes in Mali; and give critical financial advice through a voice-to-text
interface to rural women farmers and business owners in Nigeria.
“For 20 years, the foundation has sought and seeded
innovation to solve the world’s hardest problems. We believe that accelerating
progress in health and development requires collaboration among innovators from
as many disciplines and as many countries as possible,” said Kedest
Tesfagiorgis, deputy director of Global Partnerships & Grand Challenges at
the Gates Foundation.
“Maximizing the potential of AI requires a global community
of creative thinkers bringing their unique perspectives and learning from each
other.”
As these projects get underway, the foundation is eager to
continue working with and learning from partners around the world to ensure the
benefits of AI are relevant, affordable, and accessible to everyone, with an
emphasis on LMIC communities, in a manner that upholds safety, ethics, and
equity.
The Grand Challenges family of programs stems from a
century-old idea that crowdsourcing solutions to a defined set of unsolved
problems can spark innovation and accelerate progress.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and its Grand
Challenges funding partners first used Challenges—open requests for grant
proposals—in 2003 to focus attention and effort on pressing global health and
development problems for those most in need.
Together, Grand Challenges partners have awarded more than
3,600 grants to a diverse pool of problem solvers in more than 100 countries,
while at the same time fostering a global innovation ecosystem in places where
it will have the most impact.
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