Veon teams up with partners to bridge online 'AI language gap'

VEON

15/05/2024 14:30

May 15 (Reuters) - Telecom company Veon  VON.AS , mobile
operator Beeline Kazakhstan, the Barcelona Supercomputing Center
and the GSMA lobby group said on Wednesday they would work
together to bridge an "AI language gap" for under-represented
languages.
    Large language models powering 'bots' like chatGPT often
rely on swathes of online data, such as digital books, websites,
articles and blogs to learn how to generate human-like
responses. But data and resources in some languages are limited.
    "Out of nearly 7000 languages spoken around the globe, only
seven are considered high-resource languages in the digital
world: English, Spanish, French, Mandarin, Arabic, German and
Japanese," the groups said in a joint statement.
    They will collaborate on developing tools and language model
documentation in under-represented languages, including those
spoken in the countries where Veon operates - Pakistan, Ukraine,
Bangladesh, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan.
    Another language was Catalan, which is spoken by around 10
million people, the statement said.   
    "The lack of resources in other languages results in an AI
language gap which leads to sub-optimal user experience in AI
applications, deepens the bias in AI models and risks deepening
the digital divide in AI technologies ," they added.

 (Reporting by Olivier Sorgho; Editing by Alexander Smith)
 ((Olivier.Sorgho@thomsonreuters.com;))