The Federal Government through the Ministry of Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy, has launched Nigeria’s first Multilingual Large Language Model (LLM) as the country pushes forward to take a leadership position in Artificial Intelligence (AI) development in Africa.
Dr. Bosun Tijani the Communications Minister, who announced this on Friday said the launch of the LLM was one of the outcomes of the 4-day AI workshop held in Abuja between Monday and Thursday those weeks.
The AI tool was launched through a partnership between a Nigerian AI company, Awarritech, a global tech company, DataDotOrg, the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), and the National Centre for AI and Robotics (NCAIR), Bosun said.
“The LLM will be trained in 5 low resource languages and accented English to ensure stronger language representation in existing datasets for the development of Artificial Intelligence solutions. The project will also be supported by over 7,000 fellows from the 3MTT Nigeria program,” the Minister stated.
The minister further discussed that after the 4-day of co-creation with over 120 ArtificiaI Intelligence experts, the country not only had an initial draft of its National AI Strategy but also announced some significant developments and partnerships that would lead Nigeria towards accelerating the development of AI.
He also mentioned that part of the announcements was the partnership between 21st Century Technologies, Galaxy Backbone, and NCAIR Nigeria to accelerate the development of Artificial Intelligence projects of national interest.
“21st Century Technology is funding the acquisition of an initial set of GPUs to kickstart our national computing capacity. The computer which will be available to local researchers, startups, govt entities working on critical AI projects, will reside at the GBB Data center in the FCT,” he said.
At the workshop, the Minister said the NCAIR, a special purpose vehicle created to promote research and development on emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Robotics and UAV, Internet of Things (IoT), and their practical application in areas of Nigerian national interest was also relaunched.
The improved capacity at NCAIR will help it better fulfill its mandate as a digital innovation and research facility. Bosun concluded
