Microsoft said it aims to address the imbalance in AI rollouts worldwide by investing more than $50 billion in the Global South by the end of the decade.
The tech giant reveals the extent of its planned spending India AI Impact Summit In Delhi, after one funding hustle by other companies on Inauguration Day.
The Global South is considered to include the developing countries of the Southern Hemisphere, located mostly in Africa, Asia, Oceania, and Latin America.
Brad Smith, Microsoft vice president and president, elaborates on the company’s AI investment commitment in a blog postCo-written with Vice President Natasha Crampton, the piece is titled: “We need to act urgently to address the growing AI divide.”
Smith shed light on Microsoft’s own AI proliferation reportWhich shows that AI use in the Global North is almost double that of the Global South and is continuously growing, raising concerns that it will widen the already significant financial gap between the two hemispheres.
To tackle this, Microsoft said it is implementing a five-point program that can accelerate the Global South, helping to provide “a real possibility of recapturing economic growth”.
The key elements that Microsoft’s investment will focus on are: establishment of AI infrastructure; teaching people AI skills; Expanding multilingual and multicultural AI; Enabling local AI innovations for community needs; and measuring AI diffusion to guide future investments.
In terms of infrastructure, Microsoft’s plans are well underway with a $17.5 billion investment in India, the vendor had revealed in December.
Microsoft also launched several new initiatives at the New Delhi conference, including the Elevate for Educators program for India’s schools, developed in collaboration with the country’s national education and workforce training authorities, to teach AI skills to millions more students.
The vendor also promised to focus on more inclusive, localized AI models in different languages to serve countries in the Global South, addressing growing concerns of US dominance in AI seen by the Chilean government. Launch your own LATAM-GPT model earlier this month. Microsoft also revealed that it is investing in the Lingua France Africa initiative to develop data and AI models for Africa. This program is in collaboration with Masakhane African Languages Hub and the Gates Foundation.
In another move, Microsoft said its AI for Good Lab will use AI data to provide food security in sub-Saharan Africa, helping communities farm to prevent food shortages.
Microsoft also said it will increase its investment in research and data to better track AI proliferation in the future.
“The economic divide, the biggest divide between the global North and South, started because of the technology divide. We can’t repeat that experience with AI,” Smith told the Economic Times of India.
