tech
An African vision of artificial intelligence
What would African artificial intelligence (AI) look like? Olubayo Adekanmbi, a Nigerian entrepreneur, reels off ideas: as fluent in African languages as in English; as comfortable with speech as with text; and lean, so it can flourish where chips are scarce and internet patchy. By contrast, frontier labs in Silicon Valley train gargantuan models on English-heavy datasets. “The current gameplay for AI globally is completely un-African,” he says.
TL;DR
- African AI should be fluent in African languages and English.
- It should be comfortable with both speech and text inputs/outputs.
- The AI needs to be lean to function where internet and chip availability are limited.
- Current global AI development, particularly in Silicon Valley, uses large models trained on English-heavy datasets and is considered 'un-African'.
- Olubayo Adekanmbi is a Nigerian entrepreneur proposing these ideas.