The Nigerian government, under the Ministry of Communications, Innovation, and Digital Economy, unveiled Africa’s first Multilingual Large Language Model (LLM), marking a significant step towards establishing Nigeria’s leadership in Artificial Intelligence (AI) development across the continent.

This groundbreaking announcement was made by the Communications Minister, Dr. Bosun Tijani, following the successful conclusion of a four-day AI workshop held in Abuja.

Developed collaboratively by Nigerian AI company Awarritech, global tech firm DataDotOrg, the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), and the National Centre for AI and Robotics (NCAIR), Nigeria unveils its first Multilingual Large Language Model (LLM). 

This initiative aims to train the model on five low-resource languages and accented English, thereby enhancing language representation in existing datasets and facilitating the development of AI solutions.

Additionally, the project will receive support from over 7,000 fellows participating in the 3MTT Nigeria program. Furthermore, alongside the launch of the LLM, the Minister announced several noteworthy developments and partnerships geared towards expediting Nigeria’s AI progress. 

Notably, the initial draft of the country’s National AI Strategy was crafted during a four-day co-creation workshop attended by over 120 AI experts. This strategy is poised to guide Nigeria’s AI development journey as a comprehensive roadmap.