Expanding their partnership, Orange and OpenAI will now focus on creating autonomous AI solutions with a sovereign emphasis.
Orange, a leading telecommunications company with operations spanning 18 to 26 African countries, has announced a groundbreaking collaboration with OpenAI, a leading AI research laboratory. This partnership aims to democratize AI in Africa, accelerate the adoption of sovereign AI solutions, and foster inclusive digital transformation tailored to African contexts and languages.
Brad Lightcap, Chief Operating Officer of OpenAI, mentioned that this ongoing work with Orange demonstrates how businesses can use OpenAI's open models to solve real-world problems. Steve Jarrett, Chief AI Officer of Orange, stated that the collaboration with OpenAI is foundational to their strategy of using state-of-the-art AI models that are both trusted and responsible.
The collaboration between Orange and OpenAI is focused on driving digital inclusion and AI innovation across Africa. By deploying OpenAI's advanced models, including the 'gpt-oss-120b' and 'gpt-oss-20b', Orange will host AI models locally within its regional cloud and on-premise infrastructure. This local deployment advances data sovereignty by keeping African countries' data within regional infrastructures, reducing reliance on foreign data centers and maintaining regulatory compliance.
The models are fine-tuned or customized to handle over 2,000 African languages and dialects, facilitating voice recognition, translation, and conversational AI that resonates with local users. This improvement in accessibility and relevance of AI services is expected to drive digital inclusion and innovation on the continent.
Orange's 'frugal' AI approach aims for high performance with less computing power, less data, and less energy. By running the models in its own data centers, Orange can directly manage and optimize the power consumption of the customized models to reduce emissions.
The collaboration between Orange and OpenAI is seen as a blueprint for responsible deployment of state-of-the-art AI at scale. Key aspects of this collaboration include sovereign AI ecosystems, support for African languages, ethical and trusted AI, economic and social impact, and scalable infrastructure.
This partnership drives AI-powered financial inclusion partnerships, reduces microloan risk costs, boosts Orange Money usage, and contributes to significant revenue growth. Additionally, network optimization through AI lowers operational costs while supporting environmental goals like emissions reduction and digital skill development.
By deploying OpenAI's models, Orange will release the customized AI models in open source for free to local government authorities for public services. This move is expected to set a new benchmark in the telecom industry for AI excellence.
The OpenAI collaboration exemplifies Orange's commitment to Responsible AI, with a focus on pragmatism, sustainability, and performance. The gpt-oss models from OpenAI fit perfectly into Orange's Responsible AI framework, enabling it to adapt the models to the specific use case and better control the environmental impact and operational costs.
This customization process facilitates innovative use-cases in network operations and will enable Orange to build on its existing suite of 'Live Intelligence' AI solutions for enterprises. The deployment of OpenAI's models will contribute to the development of numerous innovative applications and services, such as enhancing customer experience, smarter networks, and business solutions for enterprise customers.
As an early access partner, Orange is one of the first companies globally to deploy OpenAI's new open models. Orange's deep AI engineering talent enables it to customize and distill the OpenAI models for specific tasks, creating smaller sub-models for particular use-cases while ensuring the protection of all sensitive data used in these customized models.
This collaboration between Orange and OpenAI contributes significantly to the development of sovereign, state-of-the-art AI solutions and accelerates AI adoption across Africa, positioning Orange as a leader in the continent’s AI ecosystem.
[1] Orange and OpenAI Collaborate to Democratize AI in Africa [2] Orange Accelerates Sovereign AI Adoption in Africa with OpenAI Partnership [3] Orange and OpenAI: A Blueprint for Responsible Deployment of State-of-the-Art AI at Scale [4] Orange and OpenAI: A Partnership for Digital Inclusion and Innovation in Africa [5] Orange and OpenAI: A Joint Effort to Harness AI for the Benefit of Society in Africa
- With the deployment of OpenAI's advanced models like 'gpt-oss-120b' and 'gpt-oss-20b', Orange aims to foster digital inclusion and innovation in Africa by hosting AI models locally within its regional cloud and on-premise infrastructure, thus maintaining data sovereignty and compliance.
- The collaboration between Orange and OpenAI is not just about driving AI innovation, but also about customizing models to handle over 2,000 African languages and dialects, thereby making AI services more accessible and relevant to local users, contributing to digital inclusion on the continent.
