The Gates Foundation, a philanthropic organisation backed by US billionaire Bill Gates, pledged on Sept 15 to spend at least US$1 billion (S$1.27 billion) globally over the next two years on expanding access to artificial intelligence
With the foundation having opened its Singapore office in May, chief executive Mark Suzman told The Straits Times that it is looking into how more people in the region, especially those from lower-income and rural areas, could benefit from using AI in areas such as education, agriculture and health.
He cited the Asia Pathogen Genomics Initiative – established at the Duke-NUS Centre for Outbreak Preparedness in late 2021 with the goal of eliminating infectious diseases – as an example of past work in the health-AI nexus that the foundation had supported.
Now operating in 15 countries across the region, the initiative has an AI-enabled bioinformatics program called PathGen,Suzman said. The program helps detect emerging disease threats earlier, assess risks faster, and coordinate responses within and across borders.
Such projects offer a glimpse of what the foundation could support, Suzman said, adding that “the commitment is across education, agriculture and health.”
He was speaking to The Straits Times in a video interview on Sept 11, ahead of the launch of the foundation’s latest Goalkeepers report on Sept 15. The annual report takes stock of the world’s progress on issues such as ending poverty and reducing inequalities.
The latest edition highlights the need to ensure that AI is used to narrow gaps between the richest and poorest, not widen them.
“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, chairman of the foundation, noted in the report.
“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.”
Of the US$1 billion sum, 40 per cent will go to education, such as AI tutoring initiatives, said the Gates Foundation in a statement.
Another 40 per cent will go towards healthcare, which could include the development of tools that can help in the discovery of new drugs and vaccines. A further 10 per cent will be for agriculture, supporting efforts to give smallholder farmers AI-generated advice customised to their soil, weather and crop conditions, for instance.
The remaining 10 per cent will fund initiatives to help build the digital foundation needed for equitable AI access. This could include ensuring that datasets in languages not yet understood by AI tools are incorporated.
The report cited MahaVISTAAR, a free AI advisory service for farmers rolled out by the Indian state of Maharashtra, as an example of an AI tool that can benefit smallholder farmers.
Through an app, voice calls and chat, farmers can ask questions about their crops, the weather, and pest management in their own language and get verified, localised answers, the report noted. The service costs the government less than 18 US cents per farmer.
Suzman said: “We need to make sure that AI is able to work in every spoken language, with a particular focus on languages in Asia and Africa, and so we are working with a range of partners to see how we can help facilitate that.”
This could include working with the private sector and governments, he said.
“There are significant philanthropic resources in Singapore, Malaysia generally, which we would be able to capitalise on,” he added.
On the importance of training AI models in other languages, the report pointed to an example from Malawi.
“A woman in labour might say her ‘water has broken’ in Chichewa. Translated directly to English, it would sound like she has simply ‘thrown away water’. That mistranslation could be the difference between timely, urgent medical advice and tragedy,” noted the 72-page report.
AI tools also need to be grounded in local data, the report said. For instance, a community health worker in Rwanda examining a baby with a fever faces different questions from a clinician in a well-resourced hospital.
“The AI supporting her needs to reflect that,” the report said.
It also highlighted the importance of ensuring that communities themselves are trained to use AI, and have the right access to these tools.
This would require a mix of approaches, the foundation noted in the report. These include price reductions, commitments from AI companies to make their models and computing resources available, and government and philanthropic funding.
The foundation said its committed 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.
“We can harness AI for good. But it won’t happen by accident,” Gates said in the report.
“It requires 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 stand the most to gain.”
Correction note: The Gates Foundation has clarified that it opened its Singapore office in May.
