The Nigerian government’s efforts to boost the country’s tech industry have received a significant boost with the engagement of 500 fellows from the 3 Million Technical Talent programme by Awarri, the startup selected to build Nigeria’s first Artificial Intelligence.
Since its November 2023 start, Awarri has expanded to employ 120 people, and it has just brought on 500 data collectors from the government program to aid in the creation of Nigeria’s first Large Language Multilingual Model.
Minister of Communications, Innovation, and Digital Economy, Bosun Tijani, said in a statement posted on his X account on Wednesday.
In April, the minister announced the launch of Nigeria’s first LLM after a four-day AI workshop in Abuja
The Minister said the project is a collaboration between Awarri, DataDotOrg, the National Information Technology Development Agency and the National Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, supported by over 7,000 fellows from the 3MTT programme and $3.5m in funding from various partners.
“The LLM will be trained in five low-resource languages and accented English to ensure stronger language representation in existing datasets for the development of AI solutions,” the minister stated. “The project will also be supported by over 7,000 fellows from the 3MTT programme.”
“The initiative launched under the Renewed Hope agenda, targets training 30,000 individuals in its first phase, focusing on twelve technical skills, including software development and cybersecurity.
