The Gates Foundation and OpenAI have announced a $50 million partnership aimed at supporting African countries to deploy artificial intelligence in strengthening their health systems.

The initiative, known as Horizon1000, will collaborate with African leaders to identify practical and effective ways of applying AI in healthcare delivery, with Rwanda selected as the starting point.

“In poorer countries with enormous health worker shortages and lack of health systems infrastructure, AI can be a gamechanger in expanding access to quality care,” Gates said in a blog post announcing the initiative. He has previously described artificial intelligence as one of the most transformative technologies ever developed.

The Gates Foundation has already rolled out several AI-focused projects, while Rwanda established an AI health hub in Kigali last year to advance innovation in the sector.

Under the Horizon1000 programme, the partnership aims to support 1,000 primary healthcare facilities and surrounding communities across multiple African countries by 2028, according to Gates.

The announcement comes at a time when many low-income countries are grappling with significant reductions in international aid. Gates said in December that these funding cuts had contributed to the first increase in preventable child deaths this century.

Gates noted that AI holds particular promise for countries facing critical shortages of trained health professionals, adding that estimates suggest sub-Saharan Africa lacks about six million healthcare workers.

The New York Times, a prominent US news organization,filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, the owner of ChatGPT, and Microsoft, alleging copyright infringement in training the language model.

The lawsuit contends that ChatGPT, along with other large language models (LLMs), unlawfully used "millions" of articles from the New York Times without permission, resulting in damages amounting to "billions of dollars."

The lawsuit argued that ChatGPT, by incorporating New York Times content without authorization, is now a direct competitor to the newspaper as a reliable source of information.

It claims that the language model sometimes generates "verbatim excerpts" from New York Times articles when queried about current events, offering access to subscription-based content for free.

Additionally, the lawsuit highlights instances where the Bing search engine, powered by ChatGPT, produced results sourced from a New York Times-owned website without proper attribution or referral links. This, according to the New York Times, not only deprives the newspaper of subscription revenue but also impacts advertising revenue from website visits.

The legal action, initiated in a Manhattan federal court on Wednesday, alleges that attempts for an "amicable resolution" were made in April when the New York Times approached Microsoft and OpenAI. The BBC has reached out to OpenAI and Microsoft for comments on the matter.

Multiple lawsuits

It came a month after a period of chaos at OpenAI where co-founder and CEO Sam Altman was sacked - and then rehired - over the course of a few days.

His sacking shocked industry insiders and led to staff threatening mass resignations unless he was reinstated.

But as well as the internal issues, the firm is now facing multiple lawsuits filed in 2023.

In September a similar copyright infringement case was brought by a group of US authors including Game of Thrones novelist George RR Martin and John Grisham.

That followed legal action brought by comedian Sarah Silverman in July, as well as an open letter signed by authors Margaret Atwood and Philip Pullman that same month calling for AI companies to compensate them for using their work.

And OpenAI is also facing a lawsuit alongside Microsoft - and programming site GitHub - from a group of computing experts who argue their code was used without their permission to train an AI called Copilot.

As well as these actions, there have been many cases brought against developers of so-called generative AI - that is, artificial intelligence that can create media based on text prompts - with artists suing text-to-image generators Stability AI and Midjourney in January, claiming they only function by being trained on copyrighted artwork.