Bill Gates Urges Smart AI Use at Goalkeepers Event as New Coalition Targets Language Gaps

Bill Gates told the Goalkeepers gathering in New York that increased financial aid and the smart use of artificial intelligence can reduce global inequality. Speaking with political commentator Van Jones at Jazz at Lincoln Center, Gates said the world failed to build proper moral controls into AI tools. The annual event opened with figures showing that 26 of the world's 34 wealthiest nations cut development aid to poorer countries last year. Meanwhile, the United Nations has warned that progress on its sustainable development goals to reduce poverty and improve health by 2030 is slow and uneven.

Coalition Plans

The Gates Foundation announced a new 60-member coalition including Anthropic, Google, and the OpenAI Foundation to make AI more accessible in underrepresented languages. The partnership aims to reach over 3 billion people in five years by coordinating language data efforts. Gates Foundation CEO Mark Suzman said this work must continue full speed ahead even as some tech companies urge slower development of advanced models. The coalition follows a report where the foundation committed $1 billion toward AI-focused efforts in health, education, and farming. Mozilla Data Collective CEO E.M. Lewis-Jong noted that internet-scraped training data lacks cultural diversity. Google is already funding Project Vaani to collect over 150,000 hours of audio across India, while Anthropic is working with the foundation to speed up vaccine development and crop data sets.