Orange partners with OpenAI to bring AI models to 2,000+ African languages

Orange plans to use OpenAI’s latest open-weight AI models to work with African languages, expanding beyond its current use of OpenAI’s Whisper speech model. This initiative addresses a significant gap in AI accessibility, as the benefits of AI models have largely bypassed Africa’s 2,000+ languages due to data scarcity and limited computational resources.

What you should know: Orange, a French mobile operator serving 18 African countries, signed a deal with OpenAI last year to access pre-release AI models and fine-tune large language models for translating regional African languages.

• The company started working with African languages this year using OpenAI’s Whisper speech model for basic speech recognition.
• OpenAI’s new open-weight models have publicly accessible trained parameters that developers like Orange can use to customize models for specific tasks without requiring original training data.

How it works: Orange plans to fine-tune the models using collected samples of African regional languages and deploy them locally.

• The company will provide the fine-tuned models for free to local governments and public authorities.
• This approach allows for more complex applications beyond the basic speech recognition capabilities of the Whisper model.

The big picture: The initiative represents a collaborative effort to bridge the digital divide by making African languages “first-class citizens in the AI realm.”

• According to researchers at Cornell University and a Nature journal report, African languages have been underserved by AI development due to challenges including lack of data and limited computational resources.
• Orange and OpenAI hope to catalyze an ecosystem by working with local startups and communities.

What they’re saying: “We see this initiative as a blueprint for how AI can help bridge the digital divide,” Orange’s Chief AI Officer Steve Jarrett told Reuters.

• “By collaborating with local startups and communities, Orange and OpenAI hope to catalyze an ecosystem where African languages are first-class citizens in the AI realm,” Jarrett said.