South African Founder Launches Groundbreakng African AI Language Platform – urbangeekz

South African sata scientist Pelonomi Moiloa has launched a groundbreaking large language model (LLM) designed to make AI more accessible and relevant to Africans.

Moiloa is the CEO and co-founder of Lelapa AI, a Johannesburg-based startup building artificial intelligence tools for native African languages. Lelapa AI has just introduced InkubaLM, an LLM designed for five African languages: Swahili, Yoruba, isiXhosa, Hausa, and isiZulu.

Working alongside her technical co-founder Jade Abbott, the duo has made significant strides in creating a platform that serves a combined audience of 364 million speakers.

The InkubaLM model is designed to be robust and compact, making it accessible to African communities without requiring extensive resources. The model consists of two datasets: Inkuba-Mono, a monolingual dataset collected from open-source repositories in five African languages, as well as English and French data, and Inkuba-Instruct.

According to Lelapa AI, InkubaLM (Dung Beetle Language Model) is a robust, compact model created to serve African communities without requiring extensive resources. It consists of two datasets: Inkuba-Mono and Inkuba-Instruct.

Inkuba-Mono is a monolingual dataset collected from open-source repositories in five African languages, along with English and French data, to pre-train InkubaLM models.

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“The lack of AI tools that work for African languages and recognize African names and places excludes African people from economic opportunities,” says Pelonomi Moiloa, CEO and co-founder of Lelapa AI. 

For her, working to build Africa-centric AI solutions is a way to help others in Africa enjoy the immense potential benefits of AI technologies. “We are trying to solve real problems and put power back into the hands of our people,” she says.  

Playing Catchup in AI Revolution

Africa is estimated to account for one-third of the world’s languages, about 1000 to 2000 of them. Nonetheless, despite English being spoken by only 5% of the global population, it dominates the web and AI tools. 

Efforts have been made to correct this imbalance. OpenAI’s GPT-4 includes minor languages like Icelandic, while Google Translate supports five new languages spoken by 75 million people.

African AI researchers, however, argue that these efforts are insufficient, often resulting in inaccurate digital representations of African languages. Lelapa AI’s InkubaLM aims to pioneer a more inclusive approach to natural language processing in Africa.

Lelapa AI: Africa’s Indigenous AI Model

Launched in 2022, Lelapa AI was founded out of the need to address how AI can be used for solutions and applications through an African lens. It develops speech recognition tools for African languages.

The platform is trying to create a new paradigm for AI models in Africa, explained Vukosi Marivate, a data scientist on the company’s AI team. “Unlike Western companies that rely solely on internet data, Lelapa AI adopts a hybrid approach, collaborating with linguists and local communities to collect, annotate, and validate data. This inclusive method enables the identification of potential pitfalls and ensures the model’s cultural relevance.”

Bonaventure Dossou, a researcher at Lelapa AI specializing in natural language processing (NLP), says that working with linguists enables them to develop a context-specific and culturally relevant model. “Embedding cultural sensitivity and linguistic perspectives makes the technological system better,” says Dossou. For example, the Lelapa AI team built sentiment and tone analysis algorithms tailored to specific languages.

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Other founding members of the startup include Moiloa, Jade Abbott, Vukosi Marivate, Benjamin Rosman, Pravesh Ranchod, and George Konidaris − all with backgrounds in academics, research, data science, and engineering.

Lelapa AI is backed by Mozilla Ventures and Atlantica Ventures and has raised $2.5 million in funding. Individual investors include Google’s AI chief, Jeff Dean, a vocal supporter of Deep Learning Indaba, and Karim Beguir, CEO of startup Instadeep, acquired by pharma company BioNTech for $682 million.

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