Anthropic AI and The Gates Foundation announced a joint commitment of $200 million in grant funding, Claude usage credits, and technical support for Sub-saharan Africa and India, with the intent to make AI tools adoption more accessible as “shared public goods”.
According to a statement released by The Gates Foundation, the partnership intends to bring together,” Anthropic’s AI expertise and the Gates Foundation’s programmatic experience of working with scientists, governments healthcare and underserved communities”
“This work is led by our beneficial deployments team, which provides Claude credits and engineering support to our partners in the four priority areas mentioned above,” the company mentioned in its official release.
Giving more details about the partnership, the company said that the largest part of this collaboration will focus on improving health outcomes in low- and middle-income countries, where around 4.6 billion people lack access to essential health services.
“Anthropic will work with the Gates Foundation and others on a range of new and existing programs that will accelerate the development of new vaccines and therapies, and help governments use health data to make faster, better-informed decisions, ” the company highlighted.
“We’ll create connectors (which grant Claude direct access to other platforms and tools), benchmarks, and evaluation frameworks that allow researchers, developers, and governments to better understand how AI systems perform on healthcare-related tasks,” it added.
In the field of education the company revealed that tools are being co-developed to improve educational outcomes for K-12 students in the US, sub-Saharan Africa, and India. This includes creating public goods like model benchmarks, datasets, and knowledge graphs to ensure that AI tools for math tutoring, college advising, and curriculum design are effective. The first of these will be released publicly later this year.
“In sub-Saharan Africa and India, we are creating AI-powered apps that support foundational literacy and numeracy programs. Along with the Gates Foundation and other partners, we’ve begun this work as part of the broader Global Al for Learning Alliance (GAILA),” Anthropic disclosed in its release.
In the US, Claude will also power educational tools that provide evidence-based tutoring to K-12 students, as well as career guidance for students moving into the workforce.
As far as economic mobility is concerned, the partnership will support programs designed to improve economic mobility. One of the Gates Foundation’s focus areas is increasing agricultural productivity to improve the livelihoods of the nearly two billion people whose incomes depend on smallholder farming.
“We will support this work by making agriculture-specific improvements to Claude, datasets of local crops, and benchmarks to evaluate how our models perform in agricultural applications, before releasing these tools as public goods, ” the release informed.
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