Amplify Initiative: Building A Localized Data Platform for Globalized AI

Current AI models often fail to account for local context and language, given the predominance of English and Western internet content in their training data. This hinders the global relevance, usefulness, and safety of these models as they gain more users around the globe. Amplify Initiative, a data platform and methodology, leverages expert communities to collect diverse, high-quality data to address the limitations of these models. The platform is designed to enable co-creation of datasets, provide access to high-quality multilingual datasets, and offer recognition to data authors. This paper presents the approach to co-creating datasets with domain experts (e.g., health workers, teachers) through a pilot conducted in Sub-Saharan Africa (Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, and Uganda). In partnership with local researchers situated in these countries, the pilot demonstrated an end-to-end approach to co-creating data with 155 experts in sensitive domains (e.g., physicians, bankers, anthropologists, human and civil rights advocates). This approach, implemented with an Android app, resulted in an annotated dataset of 8,091 adversarial queries in seven languages (e.g., Luganda, Swahili, Chichewa), capturing nuanced and contextual information related to key themes such as misinformation and public interest topics. This dataset in turn can be used to evaluate models for their safety and cultural relevance within the context of these languages.

@article{rashid2025_2504.14105,
  title={ Amplify Initiative: Building A Localized Data Platform for Globalized AI },
  author={ Qazi Mamunur Rashid and Erin van Liemt and Tiffany Shih and Amber Ebinama and Karla Barrios Ramos and Madhurima Maji and Aishwarya Verma and Charu Kalia and Jamila Smith-Loud and Joyce Nakatumba-Nabende and Rehema Baguma and Andrew Katumba and Chodrine Mutebi and Jagen Marvin and Eric Peter Wairagala and Mugizi Bruce and Peter Oketta and Lawrence Nderu and Obichi Obiajunwa and Abigail Oppong and Michael Zimba and Data Authors },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.14105},
  year={ 2025 }
}