Orange, the French telecommunications company, took a big step towards inclusive access to AI Large Language Models. In a press release the company announced, “OpenAI and Orange have signed an agreement that will provide Orange with direct access to OpenAI’s models, available for the first time in Europe with data processing and hosting in European data centers, enabling Orange to work on improving existing solutions across its footprint.” While the company is a major player in the communications space in Europe, most of their growth is coming from their African and Middle East subsidiaries. It’s no surprise then that there is also an African focus to their collaboration. According to the same press release, the company will partner with both OpenAI and Meta to fine-tune AI Large Language Models (LLMs) to understand regional African languages starting with Wolof and Pulaar, major languages in Senegal and across the West Africa region.
Much attention has been given to how LLMs and “Gen-AI” will transform how we live and work, but as long as it’s only available in the most popular languages the most vulnerable people will be left behind. In Senegal where Wolof is spoken more widely than French, the ability for a farmer to ask a question about a crop or an entrepreneur to get support analyzing their books by speaking to ChatGPT in Wolof will be a radical improvement in access to information and analysis.
This inclusive step forward is especially important for women. According to the UNESCO Library, in sub-Saharan Africa the gender parity index (GPI) for literacy rates ranges between 0.63 and 0.77, indicating that women’s literacy rates are significantly lower than men’s. In Senegal, only 45.4% of women, compared to 68.4% of men are literate. In Africa, literacy correlates with the ability to speak colonial languages such as French or English.
It’s not just major telecommunications companies focused on training AI to seamlessly function with African languages. Earlier this month, Lingawa, a tech company supporting the Diaspora to learn their native African languages announced a $1.1M equity raise. Investors such as Voltron Capital, WEAV Capital, and the MasterCard Foundation participated in the round. In an interview with Techpoint, co-founder and CEO Frank Williams said, “We already have AI at the core of what we have built in terms of student-tutor matching, but in the background, we’ve also started working on our African large language models.” The company is starting with Igbo and Yoruba which ChatGPT can already converse in, but just like Orange whose “long-term goal is to work with many AI technology providers to enable future models to recognize all African languages spoken and written across Orange’s 18-country footprint in the region”, Lingawa will also expand the languages it works with. Whether big or small, companies working towards a more inclusive future for LLMs are working to close the gender digital divide.