#africa (6 links)
- An African vision of artificial intelligence economist.com
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.
- Desert discs: how mobile phones are at the root of Saharan music | Music | guardian.co.uk guardian.co.uk
However eclectic your music collection, it would still need to go some way to match the sheer range of tracks shared by villagers swapping songs via Bluetooth and Sim card in the Sahara. Bollywood classics, Algerian Rai, Kuduro, French ballads – this is just a sample grab of the kind of sounds doing the rounds there, many of which can be found on Music from Saharan Cellphones, a mixtape put together by Portland-based blogger Christopher Kirkley.
"In a matter of minutes, you can buy a sheep, a goat or a brood of chickens. But they won't be delivered to you or the person you're buying a present for. Instead, they'll get a brilliant animal model, while FARM-Africa will give the real animal to a poor
- Crammed Discs / Konono N°1 crammed.be
Will be seeing them support Tortoise at the RFH. "Founded over 25 years ago by Mingiedi, a virtuoso of the likembé (a traditional instrument sometimes called "sanza" or "thumb piano", consisting of metal rods attached to a resonator)"