After years of progress toward health equity and poverty reduction, we are seeing a widening gap between countries and communities on nearly all metrics of global development. The development of new technologies and their application in resource-poor settings has been one way to address these gaps. It will take concerted action by governments, the private sector, philanthropies, and civil society to develop the solutions needed to regain footing on the Sustainable Development Goals that we use to track progress.

Since its inception, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has focused, through its partnerships and grantmaking, on applying innovation to help accelerate progress, promote human potential, and address long-standing inequities. Working with our partners we continually scan the horizon for innovations, from drought-resistant seeds to mRNA vaccines, that can make an impact toward health and development goals.

By almost all estimations, rapid advances in artificial intelligence, or AI, will make AI technology broadly available and transformative across societies and economies, with the potential to fundamentally alter the way people communicate, work, learn, and improve their well-being. In the areas where the Gates Foundation works, it is easy to imagine powerful uses for AI in everything from speeding medical breakthroughs and addressing the impacts of climate change to boosting learning outcomes and increasing agricultural production for smallholder farmers. The foundation has invested in dozens of applications of machine learning to health and development use cases to date. More recently, the rapid development and availability of large language models, like ChatGPT, has fundamentally changed what may be possible using AI. Potential gains will only be realized if the technology is implemented with the beneficiaries participating in its development. The speed with which AI is being developed poses a moment of opportunity and risk—will their creation and application be inclusive, reflecting the needs of lower-income countries, or will they be applied inequitably and further the gaps we’ve seen?

Potential gains will only be realized if the technology is implemented with the beneficiaries participating in its development.

Read the full article about AI ethics by Mark Suzman at Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.