Orange partners Open AI and Meta to incorporate African languages into large language models

French telecommunications company, Orange, has announced a partnership with ChatGTP owner, Open AI and Facebook parent company, Meta, to include West African languages into large language models (LLMs) for artificial intelligence. The partnership was announced in a statement seen by Technext. 

In the statement, Orange says the partnership is part of its commitment to digital inclusion and focus on driving growth in the Middle East and Africa. The partnership with OpenAI and Meta is expected to bring about a fine-tuning of AI Large Language models (LLMs) to understand regional languages in Africa that today are not understood by any GenAI model. 

The initiative will commence in the first half of 2025. It will initially focus on incorporating two regional languages; Wolof which is spoken by 16 million people in West Africa, and Pulaar, spoken by six million people in West Africa. 

The statement noted that the long-term goal of the partnership is to work with many AI technology providers to enable future models to recognize all African languages spoken and written across Orange’s 18-country footprint in the region.

“This innovative project aims to develop custom AI models capable of allowing customers to communicate naturally in their local languages with Orange for customer support and sales. These open-source AI models will also be provided externally by Orange with a free license for non-commercial use such as for public health, public education, and many other services,” the statement reads.

Orange to drive responsible AI and large language models

Orange intends to help drive AI innovation in these regional languages including by collaborating on these new AI models with local startups and other technology companies, and by doing so, to mitigate the growing digital divide faced by people all across the African continent. 

By fine-tuning leading AI models such as OpenAI’s ‘Whisper’ speech model and Meta’s ‘Llama’ text model with diverse examples of these languages, we will enable them to better understand these regional languages. Orange’s vision is to make AI and other related advances accessible to all, including illiterate populations, who are currently unable to benefit from the potential of artificial intelligence. The initiative is a blueprint for how AI can be used to benefit those currently excluded.

In addition to the regional African language recognition project, OpenAI and Orange have signed an agreement that will provide Orange with direct access to OpenAI’s models. This first-of-its-kind collaboration, available for the first time in Europe with data processing and hosting in European data centres, will enable Orange to work on improving existing solutions across its footprint. 

Furthermore, this new partnership will also facilitate early access to OpenAI’s latest and most advanced AI models, enabling the realization of other key use cases such as AI-based voice interactions with Orange customers.  

“Orange is focused on delivering ‘Responsible AI,’ where the company carefully chooses the most appropriate and simplest solution for each AI use case. This approach means only using the latest Large Language Models where they are necessary and otherwise choosing simpler and cheaper solutions, thereby minimizing the impact on the environment as well as reducing cost for the many valuable AI use cases deployed across Orange,” the statement reads.

Orange also is playing a key role in the development of a vibrant European AI ecosystem with its promotion of open-source AI projects with the goal of making AI affordably accessible for all.  

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