To establish Nigeria as a pioneer in the continent’s artificial intelligence (AI) development, the government of that nation has introduced Nigeria’s first multilingual large language model (LLM) through the Ministry of Communications, Innovation, and Digital Economy.
Dr. Bosun Tijani, Nigeria’s Minister of Communications, declared on Friday, April 19, that the LLM launch was inspired by a four-day AI workshop that took place in Abuja, the nation’s capital, earlier in the week.
He claims that the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), the National Centre for AI and Robotics (NCAIR), a worldwide tech business called DataDotOrg and a Nigerian AI startup called Awarritech collaborated to build the AI tool.
The minister announced that to guarantee better language representation in current datasets for creating AI solutions, the LLM would be educated in five low-resource languages, including English.
Additionally, he stated that the project will receive support from more than 7,000 fellows from the ministry’s Three Million Technical Talent (3MTT) programme.
“After an exciting week of co-creation with over 120 ArtificiaI Intelligence experts, we not only have an initial draft of our National AI Strategy, we also announced some significant developments and partnerships that will lead us towards accelerating the development of AI in Nigeria,” Tijani said.
“Also, a partnership between 21st Century Technologies, and the National Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics (NCAIR) to accelerate the development of Artificial Intelligence projects of national interest.”
Tijani further disclosed that interested parties had contributed $3.5 million in seed money to the National AI Strategy.
The financing is provided by UNDP, UNESCO, Meta, Google, Microsoft, Luminate, Lagos Business School, Data Science Nigeria, NITDA, and other organisations within the Federal Ministry of Communications, Innovation, and Digital Economy, among other international and local partners.
NITDA had earlier announced a $220,000 grant and an expense-paid training programme in Silicon Valley, USA.
The agency claims its primary goal is to use ICT as a tool in postsecondary institutions to propel the nation’s educational system.
