Relying on the way you rely, India has a minimum of 120 languages, and one other 1,300 “mother tongues,” an Indian time period that refers to native dialects. The nation’s authorities acknowledges 22 languages however primarily operates in simply two: Hindi, largely spoken in India’s north, and English. That excludes tens of hundreds of Indians who communicate neither.
Enter Microsoft’s AI for Good initiative—the tech big’s umbrella program that tries to make use of AI to unravel issues in well being, environmental safety, and human improvement. The U.S. firm has used India to pilot a number of novel makes use of of the brand new expertise, similar to an app that makes use of AI to inform farmers the perfect time to sow seeds or a mannequin that makes use of satellite tv for pc pictures to forecast how a pure catastrophe would possibly damage a susceptible inhabitants.
However Microsoft and its AI researchers are significantly fascinated with navigating India’s linguistic challenges, hoping it’d unlock breakthroughs elsewhere. “India’s complexity makes it a test bed for multilingual settings everywhere,” says Ahmed Mazhari, Asia president for Microsoft. “If you can solve and build for India, then you can solve and build for the world.”
Small languages and enormous language fashions
The Jugalbandi chatbot, which Microsoft debuted in Could 2023, is one in every of AI for Good’s flagship tasks. The chatbot is focused to rural farmers—particularly those that stay in areas that don’t communicate India’s extra standard languages—who need to find out about or entry public companies, similar to making use of for a scholarship.
Jugalbandi makes use of a big language mannequin, developed with native analysis lab AI4Bharat, to parse a question, uncover the related info, then generate an easy-to-understand reply within the person’s native tongue. (At the moment, Jugalbandi can translate 10 of India’s 22 official languages.)
(Fortune earlier featured Microsoft’s work with AI and Jugalbandi on its 2023’s “Change the World” checklist.)
One other Microsoft initiative known as VeLLM, or “Universal Empowerment with Large Language Models,” goals to enhance how GPT, the OpenAI-developed mannequin that underpins ChatGPT, works when utilizing less-popular languages. Most of at this time’s massive language fashions work greatest in a handful of main world languages—primarily English and Chinese language—as a result of a lot knowledge are in these two languages. It’s more durable to coach AI on so-called low-resource languages, the place knowledge is scarce or non-existent.
VeLLM is the muse for different experiments with AI, like Shiksha, a generative AI bot that helps lecturers create new curricula in non-English languages shortly, liberating up extra to be spent on instructing.
‘Participatory’ design
Microsoft engineers like Kalika Bali, principal researcher for Microsoft Analysis India, are cautious of cutesy expertise options that don’t mirror how rural Indians stay their lives.
Technologists have lengthy tried to make use of the South Asian nation as a testing floor to show that digital applied sciences—low cost laptops, reasonably priced web, and smartphone apps—can enhance high quality of life in rural India.
But not each initiative was a hit, Bali notes dryly. She remembers one challenge through which designers from a improvement group tried to create a recreation to assist girls farmers in India entry necessary info.
“The women gave that person such a disdainful look,” she stated. “They said ‘Do you think we have time for playing games?’”
As an alternative, Bali says she and her group pursue a “participatory” design course of. “We spend a lot of time with the communities that we are working for, trying to have them say what they want out of a technology, or how they want to solve a problem,” she says.
Not simply social good
Microsoft, in fact, isn’t simply fascinated with AI for its potential for social good. The U.S. tech big is growing its personal AI merchandise, hosted on its Azure cloud computing system. It’s additionally a key backer of ChatGPT developer OpenAI. The hype round AI has helped carry Microsoft’s inventory by 65% over the previous 12 months, pushing its market worth to $3 trillion, making it the U.S.’s Most worthy firm.
Mahzhari sees plenty of alternative for Microsoft in Asia, the place there may be “an incredible pace of change and transformation across industries and geographies.” He factors to a number of examples the place Asian firms have turned to Microsoft’s generative AI companies: Lazada, the Southeast Asian e-commerce platform owned by Alibaba, used Microsoft instruments to create the primary e-commerce chatbot in Southeast Asia.
Nonetheless, even when Microsoft’s experiments in India don’t do a lot for the corporate’s backside line instantly, they supply necessary classes for the corporate going ahead.
“Our partnerships under AI for Good and other pilot initiatives enable us to pick up early signals for advancing AI security and safety,” Mahzhari says. These classes are then used to develop “policies for much-needed guardrails” on the brand new expertise.
Bali is aware of you could’t separate her work from Microsoft’s total enterprise curiosity in AI.
“These are early forays in terms of how to make people who do not have access to technology get on the technology wagon,” she says. “Then they will become, hopefully, future technology users who would, amongst other things, also use Microsoft products.”
Fortune is internet hosting the inaugural Fortune Innovation Discussion board in Hong Kong on March 27-28. Specialists, traders, and leaders of the world’s largest firms will come collectively to debate “New Strategies for Growth,” or how firms can greatest seize alternatives in a fast-changing world.