By Supantha Mukherjee

STOCKHOLM, Aug 5 (Reuters) - French mobile operator

Orange said on Tuesday it plans to use OpenAI's latest

AI models with African languages.

The benefits of AI models have largely bypassed African

languages, numbering over 2,000, due to challenges such as lack

of data and limited computational resources, according to

researchers at Cornell University in the United States and a

report by journal Nature.

Orange, which provides telecom services in 18 African

countries, signed a deal with OpenAI last year to get access to

its pre-release AI models and fine-tune large language models to

translate regional African languages.

It said it started working with African languages this year

using OpenAI's Whisper speech model, but the new models can

extend this work to far more complex uses.

OpenAI's first open-weight models have trained parameters,

or weights, which are publicly accessible and can be used by

developers such as Orange to tweak the models for specific tasks

without requiring original training data.

Orange plans to fine-tune the models with its collected

samples of African regional languages and deploy them locally.

"We plan to provide the fine-tuned models for free to local

governments and public authorities," Orange's Chief AI Officer

Steve Jarrett told Reuters.

"We see this initiative as a blueprint for how AI can help

bridge the digital divide: by collaborating with local startups

and communities, Orange and OpenAI hope to catalyze an ecosystem

where African languages are first-class citizens in the AI

realm," Jarrett said.