Nigeria Launches First Multilingual Large Language Model in Africa
Nine out of fifty-four African nations including Nigeria have drafted National AI strategies representing only a small percentage of African nations eager to thrive in the AI economy.
In a speech during the national AI workshop week, the Nigerian Minister for Communications, Innovation, and Digital Economy, Dr. Bosun Tijani, announced a partnership between the ministry, a local AI company Awarritech, DataDotOrg a global AI company, the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), and the National Centre for AI and Robotics (NCAIR) to train five low-resourced Nigerian languages for its first multilingual large language model (LLM).
Empowering Nigeria’s AI Landscape: Bridging the Gap with Indigenous Language Models
This collaboration is to ensure Nigeria is not left behind in the thriving AI economy. The AI market has been predicted to hit $0.89 billion by Statista in 2024 which is a projected growth of 46.36% per annum. This tool is aimed at developing a stronger representation of Nigerian languages in Artificial Intelligence solutions.
Developing an indigenous LLM such as this, which takes into account local languages and cultural nuances, will make AI more inclusive thereby fostering connections globally.
Read more about Nigeria’s first multilingual large language model trained in local languages.
