Gates Foundation launches $1B AI initiative - KUOW

The Gates Foundation plans to spend at least $1 billion over the next two years to get artificial intelligence tools in the hands of educators, healthcare workers, and farmers.

The Seattle nonprofit founded by Bill and Melinda Gates announced the initiative Tuesday. It’s part of the foundation’s 10th annual Goalkeepers Report.

“ We definitely never want to be pursuing a technology for the sake of the technology,” Gates Foundation CEO Mark Suzman said in an interview with KUOW. “We are interested in the outcomes. Is it helping the human beings at the other end? But we're now comfortable from the work we've done that in those three areas we work, health and education and agriculture, there are very specific interventions that absolutely can have very beneficial outcomes if targeted carefully and with ongoing human oversight.”

Forty percent of the funding will go toward AI education programs in the U.S. and abroad, including a tool that tests students' math retention after each lesson. Another 40% is earmarked for health care, including tools for rural doctors in developing countries, like an AI-enabled ultrasound device that attaches to a regular smartphone.

“One of the ways you judge an at-risk pregnancy is through regular ultrasounds,” Suzman said. “That's what every pregnant mother in the U.S. does through the course of their pregnancy. And when you don't have an ultrasound available, what we have is this handheld device that you can attach to a cellphone… and that will produce a low-resolution image of the baby. But then, the AI algorithm that we've developed will actually give you an analysis of the child that is at the same level of quality as a high-quality ultrasound done in a hospital in a high-income setting.”

Ten percent of the grant is intended to equip small farmers around the world with tools that can measure soil health and make predictions about crop outcomes. The remaining 10% will fund a program to expand the languages AI is trained on and operates in.

The AI initiative comes at a moment of growing anxiety around the technology, with leaders and researchers at frontier labs warning about grave risks to humanity if the current development trajectory continues.

“These are incredibly serious and real challenges that need to be tackled head-on by governments both at a national level [and] at a global level,” Suzman said. “We are fully supportive of all measures to move forward on that. What we've been trying to do with this report and these initiatives, though, is separate out and say at the same time, in a world that is already massively unequal — whether it's in terms of unequaled education outcomes in the U.S. or unequaled health outcomes globally — actually AI has potential to be a huge equalizer.”