Big Tech builds AI with bad data. So scientists sought better sets.

Now Jernite, 33, is trying to push AI in a better direction. After leaving Facebook, he joined BigScience, a global effort by 1,000 researchers in 60 countries to build a more transparent, accountable AI, with less of the bias that infects so many Big Tech initiatives. The largely volunteer effort trained a computer system with good data that was curated by humans from different cultures, rather than readily available data scraped from the internet, written mostly in English, and riddled with harmful speech on race, gender, and religion. The resulting AI was released on July 12 for researchers to download and study.