Insider Brief

• OpenAI launches the OpenAI Academy to invest in developers and organizations using AI to address local challenges and drive economic growth, focusing on low- and middle-income countries.
• The Academy will offer training, technical guidance, and $1 million in API credits to support AI innovation in sectors like healthcare, education, and finance.
• The initiative will also foster global collaboration through community-building, contests, and incubators, empowering developers to create AI applications tailored to their communities.

PRESS RELEASE — OpenAI is launching the OpenAI Academy, which will invest in developers and organizations leveraging AI to help solve hard problems and catalyze economic growth in their communities. The Academy will 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 organizations tackle critical challenges in their communities, driving economic opportunity. Having access to cutting-edge technology like AI can help enhance efforts to drive sustainable development.

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

The OpenAI Academy program will provide:

• Training and Technical Guidance: Support from OpenAI experts for developers and mission-driven organizations 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 organizations solving challenges at the front lines of their communities.

This initiative builds on OpenAI’s long-standing support for AI developers and organizations working on the front lines, and we’ll be sharing more details soon about how to access the Academy’s resources.

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 organizations and the dozens of others working to address global challenges.

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.

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

SOURCE