IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/zbw/glodps/1845.html

Count the poor in AI's language benchmarks

Author

Listed:
  • Dang, Hai-Anh H.

Abstract

A new coalition aims to let 3.4 billion speakers of underrepresented languages use AI in their own language and voice within five years, and it promises benchmarks to track progress. In an illustration with one large multilingual benchmark, weighting regions by where the world's extreme poor live, rather than by population, lowers scores by 4 to 8 percentage points for leading closed models and by about 14 for the best evaluated open-weight model. Many African languages also still need more tokens for the same text, which raises the cost of serving them. This essay suggests that the coalition report whether people in poverty can complete useful tasks safely, in a language they use, at an affordable cost.

Suggested Citation

  • Dang, Hai-Anh H., 2026. "Count the poor in AI's language benchmarks," GLO Discussion Paper Series 1845, Global Labor Organization (GLO).
    • Handle: RePEc:zbw:glodps:1845
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/344294/1/GLO-DP-1845.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • I32 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Welfare, Well-Being, and Poverty - - - Measurement and Analysis of Poverty
    • L86 - Industrial Organization - - Industry Studies: Services - - - Information and Internet Services; Computer Software
    • O15 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - Economic Development: Human Resources; Human Development; Income Distribution; Migration
    • O33 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Innovation; Research and Development; Technological Change; Intellectual Property Rights - - - Technological Change: Choices and Consequences; Diffusion Processes
    • Z13 - Other Special Topics - - Cultural Economics - - - Economic Sociology; Economic Anthropology; Language; Social and Economic Stratification

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:zbw:glodps:1845. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/glabode.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.