Without itemizing all our problems, do you think AI can turn things around for Africa?
AI is mostly inert technology that becomes reactive to the intent of its orchestrator, so I avoid talking like it’s a genie we can rub and poof, out comes solutions. The African problem (to the extent that we can even articulate it) isn’t one that was bottle-necked by intelligence, so it’s not going to be solved by having mechanized data modeling on tap.
It is entirely possible, however, that the existential threat of foreign parties controlling AI will force Africa to seriously consider the implications of its own sovereignty today, but one can only hope.
We are still in the thick of the AI revolution, but already it seems like the continent of Africa is swimming against the tide. Is there any course correction that can turn Africa into a key player?
Africa is too sprawling for me to even wrap my head around what a course correction might look like. There are too many moving parts, various misaligned players and interested parties, and Africa is highly responsive to/affected by foreign interests (think US and China) who are motivated to not let Africa operate in a vacuum as far as the new Cold War (this is what I call the frontier lab wars) is concerned.
So, yeah, it’s difficult to imagine Africa’s hand in this game of intelligence poker, because Africa is too constrained and manipulable. I wish it weren’t true, but it is.
I’d rather speak of Nigeria. A similarly-opaque base, but at least it’s smaller (enough to reason about), and it’s also familiar to me. For Nigeria, the playbook seems simple to me that I might as well spell it out cleanly:
- We need to actively put money in the hands of the best people building and experimenting with these technologies, and
- We need a list of problems that could theoretically be solved (or at least ameliorated) by the current AI/ML technologies today, and
- We need a way for stakeholders across disciplines to share knowledge about their fields and collaborate.
The government should only provide the means for the above to happen, in my opinion. The government is the only instrument we have for ensuring the efficiency and flywheel for inter-disciplinary collaboration. This means the following:
- Sourcing for and providing an abundance of local compute
- Incentivizing the private sector players to care about communal breakthroughs
- Organizing referendums and theses (see: America’s Federalist Papers, precursor to the Constitution) for crafting a clear vision for the nation, planned in decades and measured in bi-annual intervals.
We need a national psychosis (pardon my French), a fervor we haven’t seen in this country in such a long time. A crystal-clear vision for what the future may look like if we harness this technology as a collective to potentially lift millions of people out of ignorance, poverty, disease and starvation is enough to fill even the most disillusioned with, ahem, renewed hope.
Sometimes it feels like we are speaking about AI in a less exciting way, with a heavy focus on using ChatGPT to pursue mediocre writing careers. Any revolutionary use of AI, aside from Terra Industries, has certainly eluded me. How can Africa avoid becoming merely a consumer of AI developed elsewhere?
This is one of those moments in history where being a consumer of the technology isn’t that big a deal, at least to me. Only a few people in the world can innovate on this technology, and they’re locked in billion-dollar contracts at frontier labs.
This technology is like fire: we shouldn’t care about making our own fire, but about harnessing it to bring light, heat and energy to our homes. On this, I agree: thinking of the technology purely as “ChatGPT” is a rube’s perspective, yet I’m not mad at it. I don’t expect the average person to know about this technology beyond a chat interface. The builders should, and do (case in point: me). The technology as it exists today, however, is both expensive and punishing of error, which means if we are to gain true mastery here, this is the sort of thing labs, accelerators and grounds for experimentation are built for. If we cannot properly articulate what we want to solve with technology, we won’t be able to see the contours of the technology either.
Because the technology is expensive to deploy and experiment with, builders in Nigeria have to follow the path of least resistance (ie, use it in ways that have been proven to yield revenue), which is why you may be disillusioned by the case studies you see in the wild. Yet, if you peer deeper, you’ll see people deploying the technology (even today) to impressive ends.
(A small, potentially contestable claim: because the technology is pricy, Nigerian or African builders in the AI space may be averse to building for the continent, instead choosing to build locally but for an international audience. A form of brain drain.)
Is the chatbot race over, considering ChatGPT and Claude’s dominance? Would you bet your money on a new African chatbot, and why?
Hah, I wasn’t even aware there was a chatbot race. Chatbots are mere interfaces wrapping your model of choice with the context required to do the job. In that regard, different chatbots may be suited for different jobs due to substrate/context lock-in. Nothing’s going to beat Google’s Gemini at parsing context across my Google, Gmail, location data, YouTube and browser histories, for example, because no one has the ability to natively stitch that data together like Google will.
And while Claude Code may be superior to OpenAI at code-related tasks this month, my IDE and codebase are portable contexts, so I can always switch between either provider whenever one or the other records a benchmaxxing breakthrough :)
Seen in this light, then, the context is what matters when you have hit a baseline of model competence, so if we want African chatbot dominance, we must ask ourselves: where is the African context?
I suspect there is value in reframe this as narrow-domain chatbots (though why chatbot specifically?) within African contexts (education, healthcare, legal, logistics and commerce, etc)
What kind of infrastructure—digital, physical, or regulatory—is most urgently needed for an AI economy?
We need compute. Lots of it. We also need data, and we’ve barely begun to do the work to collect reams of this stuff. We’ve lost historical data, and are currently losing real-time data. We need a n
There is a version of events where we outsource our thinking to AI, and we become duller for it. Do you ever worry about what this might portend for the region?
How much worse do you reckon it can get? It might be my own cognitive bias on display here, but Africa-wide, this isn’t a problem I take very seriously. We are poised to become much smarter, on average, than dumber from interacting with this technology. For one thing, if Africans are using AI chatbots en masse, it’d mean a lot of us can read, or at least understand what the LLM is saying. That sounds like a good thing. Cognitive offloading suggests the presence of cognition a priori.
Are there any actual AI products in development on the continent that actually excite you, and why?
None that I can think of for now, but this isn’t an indictment on the continent. I really haven’t been paying close attention, as I’m currently studying and building (tough to pay attention to the ambient preoccupations of others in this mode). I am, however, interested specifically in edtech and healthcare AI startups, and I’m working on something that may be interesting in the healthcare space.
If you had to advise an African government about making the most of AI, what would you say to them?
I’d say “give your innovators everything they need to attempt to augment the state’s infrastructure with technology, and get the hell out of their way. Fund safety and implementation researchers. Increase allocations to schools. God be with thee.”
What do you think we should pay attention to that we are not currently focused on enough?
I would have said “we should pay attention to the mass knowledge transfer, via RLHF, of human capital from Africa to the West, encoded permanently in trained models”, but that ship’s sailed. Africans were paid peanuts to train the intelligence that has now made them less useful in the global work force, but that’s the way of the world. What we need to pay attention to is the value of African human capital. We need thinkers and visionaries who can learn how to harness it for our own benefit, otherwise the pillaging will continue until morale improves.
We have a sprawling youth population, and we don’t know what to do with them. The West did, though.
What skills should every young African start learning today, regardless of their profession?
We all need to learn how the world really works.