New Welsh government language partnership with OpenAI

The Welsh Government has announced a new data partnership with OpenAI to improve how AI technologies work in Welsh. As part of the new Cymraeg 2050, the partnership aims to solidify the government’s aim to reach a million Welsh speakers and increase the daily use of the language by 2050.

In his latest speech to to the Senedd, Jeremy Miles, Cabinet Secretary for the Economy, Energy and Welsh Language said, “Cymraeg belongs to us all, and we all have a duty to protect it and to make sure it grows in all aspects of society. Since we published our Welsh language technology action plan in 2018, we’ve invested £2.5 million in creating and working on many of the digital components that are vital for our language. As of today, this includes our new partnership with OpenAI to improve how ChatGPT works in Welsh.”

The partnership will build open data archives to contribute data to the research community, to improve the linguistic performance of AI models and applications. With the Welsh Language Education Bill being introduced in a few weeks, technology is set to play a key role in delivering against government priorities in enabling Welsh school pupils to become independent and confident Welsh speakers. 

Other priorities include ensuring the language flourishes alongside economic growth by supporting economic development in communities with a high density of Welsh speakers. According to the Cabinet Secretary, this priority will be delivered through making these communities attractive places to live and work as well as through programmes like ARFOR, a local government joint venture to encourage entrepreneurship in Welsh language heartlands and increasing language transmission within families and communities. “Technology is a silver thread that runs through all of these areas”, Miles added, calling for information to people in Wales and beyond for input into current and future Welsh language technology government work.

Anna Makanju, VP of Global Affairs at OpenAI, said: 

“The Welsh Government has been a great partner in creating an open-source dataset for training language models. At OpenAI, we want our models to understand as many languages and cultures as possible so that they can benefit as many people as possible.

Since the Welsh Government published its Welsh language technology action plan in 2018, it has funded, created, and worked on many of the digital components that the language needs.”