How Our Llama Grant Recipients Are Tackling Global Issues

Takeaways

• Today, we’re excited to announce the recipients of the 2023 Llama Impact Grants, who will be awarded $500,000 each to support their use of AI to address pressing social issues. 
• Wadhwani AI, Digital Green and Dana-Farber will use Llama 3 to improve English language learning in public schools in India, provide agricultural advice to small-scale farmers and match cancer patients to clinical trials.

Today, we’re excited to announce the recipients of the 2023 Llama Impact Grants. We launched our grants program in 2023 to support innovative use cases of Llama 2 and Llama 3, our open source AI models, that address pressing social issues. We received over 800 applications from organizations in over 90 countries, proposing uses of Llama in education, the environment and open innovation. From that pool of applicants, twenty finalists stood out, and three proposals led the pack.

Making English More Accessible to Students in India

Based in Gujarat, India, Wadhwani AI plans to use Llama 3 to create an AI-enabled reading fluency assessment to enhance English reading and comprehension skills in public schools in Gujarat, India. Their project, which was created in partnership with Gujarat’s Department of Education, will employ Llama to generate passages and comprehension questions tailored to the needs, abilities and learning levels of students learning English. Students will read passages aloud, then the program will flag mispronunciations and generate new, culturally relevant passages using mispronounced words, targeting and improving problem areas. English plays an important role in social and economic mobility in India, and Wadhwani AI’s project will use Llama to take important steps toward making English more accessible to all.

Advising Farmers in Underserved Areas

Digital Green’s Farmer Chat is a multilingual AI chatbot that provides customized, on-demand agricultural advisory services to farmers in underserved areas in India, Kenya and Nigeria. For their project, Digital Green plans to train Llama 2 on a vast repository of agricultural data, adapting the model to the specific needs and contexts of different regions, and improving Farmer Chat’s accuracy and relevance. Llama’s conversational capabilities will be used to engage with farmers, understand their queries and provide comprehensive and practical responses in a variety of local languages, including Hindi, Swahili and Kikuyu. The project, which will be a partnership with One Acre Fund, aims to help improve climate resilience and reduce poverty among small-scale farmers by lowering the cost of agricultural advisory services.

Matching Cancer Patients to Clinical Trials

Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI), based in the US, plans to build a new open source AI platform to computationally match cancer patients to clinical trials. Dana-Farber’s project will use Llama 3 to summarize and comprehend unstructured clinical notes and unstructured clinical trial eligibility criteria, enabling rapid identification of appropriate trial options for individual patients. The new AI models will be integrated into Dana-Farber’s existing open source MatchMiner platform and evaluated with clinical partners. Clinical trials are essential for the development of new cancer therapies, and efficient matching can help to make more of these trials possible.

Runners Up and Impact Innovation Awardees

Jacaranda Health, the runner up for the Grants, was awarded $300,000 for their plan to expand the capabilities of their AI digital health service, PROMPTS, using Llama. We’ve also given grants to eleven winners of the Llama Impact Innovations Awards, an extension of the grants program that we created to further identify and support organizations based in Africa, the Middle East, Turkey, Asia Pacific, and Latin America that are already using Llama 2 and 3 to address issues in their region. In addition to financial awards, winners and runners-up will have access to a range of resources to help them realize their projects, including mentorship, partnership opportunities, and ad credits.  We’re excited to see how Llama can contribute to social progress around the world, and we encourage eligible organizations to apply to the 2024 Llama Impact Grants.