OpenAI, Meta, and Orange are partnering to develop artificial intelligence models for African languages, starting with Wolof and Pulaar in West Africa. According to reporting by Loni Prinsloo and Jillian Deutsch for Bloomberg, the initiative will launch in the first half of 2025 and aims to address the lack of AI language models for Africa’s numerous dialects. The project will initially focus on these two languages, which are spoken by 22 million people, with plans to expand to other languages including Lingala, Swahili, and Bambara. Orange will utilize European and African cloud capacity for model training and plans to implement the technology for customer service, public health, education, and business applications. The partnership includes giving Orange early access to OpenAI’s models for developing customer interaction capabilities.