OpenAI Launches Academy to Support AI Innovation

OpenAI has introduced the OpenAI Academy, a new initiative aimed at supporting innovation in artificial intelligence (AI) across low and middle-income countries. This program seeks to ensure that the potential of AI is accessible to diverse communities, backing local developers, and organizations to address challenges in their regions.^[1]  

The Academy will focus on enhancing sectors such as healthcare, education, and agriculture by providing access to advanced AI technologies. Despite the growth of tech industries in emerging markets, many face limitations in access to training and resources. The OpenAI Academy aims to bridge this gap by investing in local talent and infrastructure, which could drive economic advancements.

Key components of the Academy program include:

• Training and Technical Guidance: Developers and mission-driven organizations will receive support from OpenAI experts to effectively leverage AI technologies.

• API Credits: The initiative will distribute $1 million in API credits to expand access to OpenAI models, enabling participants to build and deploy applications.

• Community Building: The Academy will foster a global network of developers to collaborate and share knowledge, driving innovation.

• Contests and Incubators: OpenAI plans to partner with philanthropists to invest in organizations addressing local challenges.

This launch builds on OpenAI's commitment to support developers tackling global challenges. Previous successes include KOBI, a winner of the OpenAI prize at The Tools Competition, which developed AI tools to assist students with dyslexia. Another project, I-Stem, improved educational access for visually impaired individuals in India.

In addition to launching the Academy, OpenAI has taken steps to enhance accessibility by translating key benchmarks into various languages, including Yoruba and Swahili. This ensures that AI technologies remain relevant across different cultural and economic contexts. It has also funded and published a professional translation of the Massive Multitask Language Understanding (MMLU) benchmark into 14 languages, including Arabic, Chinese, French, and Spanish. This benchmark, which measures general AI intelligence, is now accessible to a broader audience.

Recently, OpenAI introduced a new series of AI models, named o1, known internally as “Strawberry”. This update focuses on improving the reasoning abilities of AI models, enabling them to handle complex tasks in science, coding, and math more effectively than previous versions.

The firm behind ChatGPT is in discussions to raise $6.5 billion in a new funding round that could boost its valuation to $150 billion, anonymous sources familiar with the matter told Bloomberg. This figure marks a significant jump from the company's $86 billion valuation in its previous tender offer earlier this year, positioning OpenAI as one of the world’s most valuable startups.

OpenAI announced before that its popular chatbot, ChatGPT, now boasts over 200 million weekly active users, doubling its user base since last fall.