French telecommunications company Orange has announced a partnership with ChatGPT owner Open AI and Facebook parent Meta to include West African languages in its large-scale artificial intelligence language model (LLM). The partnership was announced in a statement obtained by Technext.
Orange said in a statement that the partnership is part of its digital inclusion efforts and is focused on driving growth in the Middle East and Africa. The partnership with OpenAI and Meta aims to fine-tune the AI large-scale language model (LLM) to understand regional African languages that cannot be understood by current GenAI models.
The effort will begin in the first half of 2025. The initial focus will be to incorporate two regional languages: Wolof, spoken by 16 million people in West Africa, and Poular, spoken by 6 million people in West Africa.
According to the statement, the long-term goal of the partnership is to work with many AI technology providers to ensure that future models can recognize all African languages, spoken and written, in the 18 countries where Orange represents the region.
“This innovative project aims to develop custom AI models that enable customers to communicate naturally with Orange in their local language for customer support and sales. These open source AI models are also made available externally by Orange under a free license for non-commercial use, such as for public health, public education and many other services,” the statement said.
Orange plans to drive AI innovation in these regional languages, including collaborating with local startups and other tech companies on these new AI models. In this way, the company aims to mitigate the widening digital divide faced by people across the continent.
Leading AI models such as OpenAI’s Whisper language model and Meta’s Llama text model can be fine-tuned using a range of examples from these languages to gain a deeper understanding of these regional languages. Orange’s vision is to make AI and other related advances accessible to everyone, including illiterate people who currently cannot benefit from the potential of artificial intelligence. This initiative is a blueprint for how AI can be leveraged to benefit those who are currently excluded.
In addition to the African Regional Language Awareness project, OpenAI and Orange have signed an agreement that gives Orange direct access to OpenAI’s models. Available for the first time in Europe with data processing and hosting in European datacenters, this unique collaboration will enable Orange to work on improving existing solutions across its footprint.
Orange is partnering with Open AI and Meta to integrate African languages into its large-scale language models.
Additionally, this new partnership will provide early access to OpenAI’s latest and most cutting-edge AI models, enabling other important use cases such as AI-based voice interactions with Orange customers.
