Tech giants like Microsoft and Google have turned to Karya, a startup founded by Manu Chopra, to enhance AI data quality. This social impact company employs local workers, predominantly women from rural Indian areas, to gather text, voice, and image data in regional languages. Karya stands out by offering fair wages, often 20 times the minimum wage, and aims to produce superior-quality Indian-language data for tech companies.
These efforts address the crucial issue of providing accurate and relevant data for AI applications catering to non-English speaking users. Google, in collaboration with Karya, is striving to create a generative AI model for 125 Indian languages, aiming to reach every district in the country. Their goal is to better serve India’s internet users, a population of nearly one billion, pushing for AI-powered services across sectors like healthcare, education, and finance.
The move is significant as most AI models have primarily been built on English-language data, leading to biases and inadequacies in representing diverse languages. Karya’s approach, supported by the likes of Microsoft and the Gates Foundation, tackles this issue, providing gender-intentional datasets to curb biases in large language models. Besides aiding technology companies, Karya’s primary goal is social impact, aiming to alleviate poverty and empower rural workers by providing fair opportunities for those in need.
With a workforce largely consisting of school-educated women, the startup focuses on reducing economic disparities by providing fair wages and equipping workers with the resources needed to thrive in their communities. Moreover, Karya’s outreach extends beyond India, aiming to expand its service globally to regions like Africa and South America. The startup’s vision holds significance in uplifting communities by providing not just an income but also the means for future generations to benefit from education and opportunities.
