After warning AI is too dangerous, Bill Gates bets a billion on its upside
Gates Foundation pledges at least $1 billion over two years to widen AI access in health, education and agriculture, warning of a rich-poor divide.
The Gates Foundation's 2026 Goalkeepers report outlines spending of at least $1 billion over two years on AI access in health, education and farming. Gates notes over 90% of early LLM training data was English, with speech recognition error rates below 6% in English but above 60% in Yoruba. Cited projects include Penda Health clinics in Kenya (16-point diagnostic accuracy gain), Gemini Guided Learning in Sierra Leone (1.7 years of learning gains in eight weeks), and India's MahaVISTAAR reaching 740,000+ farmers at under 18 cents per person.
- At least $1 billion over two years for AI access in health, education, agriculture
- Over 90% of early LLM training data came from English sources
- Funding includes folding non-English sources into large training datasets
- Foundation plans roughly $200 billion total spending before closing in 2045
From the original article
3 min read at the-decoder.com
The Gates Foundation is investing at least a billion dollars over two years to make AI tools more widely available in health, education, and agriculture. Bill Gates warns that more than 90 percent of the training data behind early language models came from English sources, and that speech recognition fails 60 percent of the time in Yoruba. The market, he says, is "a terrible guarantor of equal opportunity."
By Maximilian Schreiner · the-decoder.com
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