According to an official statement, OpenAI is launching the OpenAI Academy, which will invest in developers and organisations leveraging AI to help solve hard problems and catalyse economic growth in their communities. The Academy claims to ensure that the transformative potential of artificial intelligence is accessible and beneficial to diverse communities worldwide, starting in low—and middle-income countries.  

Developers and mission-driven organisations tackle critical community challenges, driving economic opportunity. Access to cutting-edge technology like AI can help enhance efforts to drive sustainable development.  

OpenAI emphasised, “Many countries have fast-growing technology sectors with talented developers and innovative organisations, but access to advanced training and technical resources remains limited. Investing in developing local AI talent can fuel economic growth and innovation across sectors like healthcare, agriculture, education, and finance.”  

What the OpenAI Academy program offers 

• Training and Technical Guidance: Support from OpenAI experts for developers and mission-driven organisations leveraging AI.  
• API Credits: Distributing an initial $1 million in API credits to expand access to OpenAI models, enabling participants to build and deploy innovative applications.  
• Community Building: Fostering a global network of developers to collaborate, share knowledge, and drive collective innovation.  
• Contests and Incubators: Partnering with philanthropists to invest in organisations solving challenges at the front lines of their communities.  

“Over the past year, we’ve seen first-hand that investing in AI education, resources, and community-building can have an outsized impact. For example, KOBI(opens in a new window), the winner of the OpenAI prize at The Tools Competition(opens in a new window), uses AI to help students with dyslexia learn to read. I-Stem(opens in a new window), one of the winners of the turn.io Chat for Impact contest(opens in a new window), uses AI to enhance access to inaccessible content designed to help blind and low-vision communities in India find meaningful employment. OpenAI has provided API credits and technical guidance to support the winning organisations and the dozens of others working to address global challenges,” the statement added.  

To further support developers around the world, OpenAI also funded and published(opens in a new window) a professional translation of the Massive Multitask Language Understanding (MMLU) benchmark(opens in a new window), a measure of general AI intelligence into 14 languages: Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, French, German, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, Swahili, and Yoruba.   

OpenAI opined that “Supporting those who understand their communities' unique cultures, economies, and social dynamics will help ensure that AI applications are tailored to meet local needs. Developers and organisations are key to making artificial intelligence more widely accessible and enabling people worldwide—regardless of where they live or what language they speak—to use the technology to solve hard problems.” 

OpenAI