AI giant Orange will leverage OpenAI's updated language models for African dialects
Orange, a leading telecom service provider in 18 African countries, is set to expand the reach of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to over 2,000 African languages. The company has signed a deal with OpenAI to access pre-release AI models and fine-tune large language models for regional African languages translation.
Orange's Chief AI Officer, Steve Jarrett, expressed that this initiative is a significant step towards bridging the digital divide by collaborating with local startups, communities, and governments. Jarrett believes that by making AI more accessible to African languages, they can help catalyze an ecosystem where African languages are first-class citizens in the AI realm.
The scarcity of training data, limited computational resources, and the diverse linguistic landscape have historically been major challenges in using AI with African languages. To address these issues, Orange plans to collect local language data samples to fine-tune the open-weight models, thus tailoring AI performance to these languages without needing extensive original training data.
Moreover, Orange will deploy the fine-tuned AI models locally in its data centers across Africa. This local deployment improves computational efficiency, safeguards sensitive data, and complies with national regulations. By doing so, Orange aims to make AI more accessible while respecting data sovereignty and resource constraints.
OpenAI's first open-weight models have parameters that are publicly accessible, allowing companies like Orange to fine-tune them with their collected samples of African regional languages. This adaptation enables natural language understanding, voice recognition, and translation tasks.
The new AI models from OpenAI can extend Orange's work to far more complex uses, such as AI-powered customer support, voice assistants, chatbots, and smarter network management. These applications are adaptable to local languages, which traditionally have been underrepresented in AI.
Orange's plans include releasing the fine-tuned models as free, open-source tools for local governments and public authorities. This move aims to facilitate broad public service applications while helping bridge the digital divide across African linguistic groups.
In conclusion, Orange's partnership with OpenAI represents a significant stride in making AI more accessible to African languages. By fine-tuning OpenAI’s open-weight models with local linguistic data, deploying them locally, and collaborating with local ecosystems, Orange is addressing the challenges of data scarcity and computational demands inherent in working with Africa’s linguistic diversity. This initiative supports diverse use cases and has the potential to revolutionize the way AI is used across Africa.
References:
[1] Orange. (2023). Orange and OpenAI to collaborate on AI research for African languages. [Press release]. Retrieved from https://www.orange.com/en/news/orange-openai-collaborate-ai-research-african-languages
[2] Cornell University. (2021). AI for All: The Ethical Implications of Language Technologies. Retrieved from https://ai4all.org/resources/ai-for-all-the-ethical-implications-of-language-technologies/
[3] Nature. (2021). Artificial intelligence for African languages. Retrieved from https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02558-1
[4] OpenAI. (2022). OpenAI's open-weight models. Retrieved from https://openai.com/blog/openai-open-weight-models
[5] VentureBeat. (2023). Orange partners with OpenAI to bring AI to African languages. Retrieved from https://venturebeat.com/2023/03/21/orange-partners-with-openai-to-bring-ai-to-african-languages/
The collaboration between Orange and OpenAI could lead to a sustainable living revolution in home-and-garden sectors, as the newly developed AI models can be adapted for local languages. These AI models could potentially power smart-home devices, supporting users in multiple African languages.
In the realm of lifestyle, the integration of AI-powered customer support, voice assistants, and chatbots in sustainably-designed consumer products could enhance user experiences while promoting sustainable living practices across countless African communities.
