Nigeria’s Minister of Communications, Innovation, and Digital Economy, Dr Bosun Tijani has unveiled the country’s inaugural multilingual Large Language Model (LLM), following a four-day National Artificial Intelligence Strategy Co-Creation Workshop held in Abuja,
The AI tool, developed through a collaborative effort between Nigerian AI firm Awarritech, global tech giant DataDotOrg, the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), and the relaunched National Centre for AI and Robotics (NCAIR), represents a leap forward in Nigeria’s AI capabilities.
Designed to process and respond to queries in multiple languages, the LLM will be trained in five low-resource languages in addition to English, ensuring inclusive language representation within AI datasets. To bolster this endeavour, over 7,000 fellows from Nigeria’s Three Million Technical Talent (3MTT) program will lend their support to the LLM project.
Moreover, the workshop convened over 120 AI experts to formulate a complete policy aimed at advancing AI adoption throughout the country. Minister Tijani disclosed that the National Artificial Intelligence Strategy secured $3.5 million in seed funding from interested parties, which shows a strong commitment on the country’s part to fostering AI innovation.
In addition to the multilingual LLM, Nigeria unveiled three other transformative initiatives. The Nigeria Computing Infrastructure Pilot aims to address resource limitations hindering AI projects, while the Nigeria Artificial Intelligence Collective seeks to promote collaboration among various AI stakeholders.
Another initiative, Rapporteur AI, serves to introduce an innovative tool designed to automate report generation, enhancing efficiency in data analysis and decision-making processes.
