Nonprofit Current AI is racing to build the World Wide Web of AI, free for all
“In India, there are hundreds of different languages and dialects, and right now AI is not representing them,” Current AI CEO Ayah Bdeir said in an...
Key points
- “In India, there are hundreds of different languages and dialects, and right now AI is not representing them,” Current AI CEO Ayah Bdeir said in an interview with TechCrunch.
- “They’re not investors; they’re funders,” Bdeir said.
- “And with English driving the largest language models and AI systems, a bulk of the world’s languages and, consequently, cultures and communities are left behind,” Bdeir said.
- “For Indigenous languages, missionary Bible translations become training data before communities have set any rules,” she said.
What happened
“In India, there are hundreds of different languages and dialects, and right now AI is not representing them,” Current AI CEO Ayah Bdeir said in an interview with TechCrunch. “They’re not investors; they’re funders,” Bdeir said. “And with English driving the largest language models and AI systems, a bulk of the world’s languages and, consequently, cultures and communities are left behind,” Bdeir said. “For Indigenous languages, missionary Bible translations become training data before communities have set any rules,” she said. So when a technology can’t speak your language, it can’t hold your culture either,” she said. “Every one of them has built the question into their work,” she said, “rather than accepting the usual default, where complexity becomes the excuse to let a government or a tech company decide for everyone.” As for how much progress can be made with a $3.2 million budget split across four organizations, Bdeir says, “Scale is not always the measure.