By Supantha Mukherjee

STOCKHOLM (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.