Building African-language AI is easier than finding the data

When Vambo AI, a Johannesburg-based artificial intelligence (AI) model builder, set out to build MORENA , a 1.5-billion-parameter model covering 12 African languages, it had access to a supercomputer through a United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)-backed programme. It had the graphics processing units (GPUs), specialised chips that power AI computing, but struggled to find enough real African-language text. “Finding that much real data was close to impossible, so a lot of it was synthetic,