By 
By Ross Moyo
Zimbabwean-born richest businessman Strive Masiyiwa’s Cassava Technologies has taken a seat at the table with the world’s largest technology companies in a new global AI alliance.
Cassava is listed alongside Nvidia, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, the OpenAI Foundation and the World Bank Group as part of an initial 60-member coalition backing a five-year ambition to bring AI to 3.4 billion people in underrepresented languages.
The initiative was announced by the Gates Foundation this week.
For Masiyiwa, whose group is building AI infrastructure across Africa, the partnership places Cassava among global standard-setters shaping the next phase of AI development.
The coalition is calling for non-proprietary language data to be made open to every builder under open licences, and for model-makers to be measured against benchmarks for low-resource languages.
“We need to gather quality data responsibly and with consent, make non-proprietary data open to every builder, set benchmarks, and ensure model-makers use them,” the organisations said in a joint commitment.
The alliance includes tech giants, AI labs, researchers, governments, philanthropies and civil society groups such as the Centre for Open Societal Systems (COSS) and Agentic AI Foundation.
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