In a groundbreaking move set to redefine global communication, The Federal Government of Nigeria has launched Africa’s first Multilingual Large Language Model (LLM) which is used to handle and respond to queries in multiple languages.
Dr Bosun Tijani who announced this on his official X account said the launch of the LLM was one of the outcomes of the 4-day AI workshop held in Abuja.
“The LLM will be trained on 5 low resource languages and accented english to ensure stronger language representation in existing datasets for development of Artificial Intelligence solutions.
The project will also be supported by over 7,000 fellows from the 3MTT Nigeria program,” the Minister stated.
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.
He said part of the announcements was the partnership between 21st Century Technologies, Galaxy Backbone and 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 compute which will be available to local researchers, startups, government entities working on critical AI projects, will reside at the GBB data centre in the FCT.
“Finally, we are also pleased to announce the relaunch of NCAIR with improved capacity with the support of CISCO.
Looking ahead, the potential for FG’s multilingual tool is limitless, it heralds a new era of communication where language is no longer a barrier but a bridge connecting people and cultures. The multilingual tool underscore a commitment to innovation and inclusivity.
