Africa secures more than half of Gates’ AI innovation grants

Projects aim to build large language models suitable for low- and middle-income countries

African innovators have won more than half of 50 projects funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to build artificial intelligence language models suitable for use in low- and middle-income countries.

The projects, announced on 9 August, will receive up to US$100,000 each. The 29 projects from Africa range from developing chatbots that can be used by people who lack literacy to automated programmes that can analyse large health datasets.