An African vision of artificial intelligence economist.com · Originally posted on Pinboard

Another focus for African innovation is so-called “small language models” for specific tasks, which have at most a few billion parameters (frontier LLMs have trillions) [...]

All this amounts to a somewhat counter-cultural vision of AI, prizing modesty over scale and context over omniscience. It may not survive the all-conquering ambitions of Silicon Valley. But for now African researchers have found a niche.