Homegrown AI seeks solutions to local challenges
Mbongeni Mguni | Monday May 22, 2023 06:00
While it has been around for a long while, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is dominating public discourse in technology globally, as the roaring success of ChatGPT and its subsequent updates have shown the world-changing potential of the computer science.
So pervasive are AI’s uses and adaptability across professions, sectors, and every aspect of life, that regulators across the world are scrambling to restrain the power of the computer science and control what can be done with it.
“The development of AI is as fundamental as the creation of the microprocessor, the personal computer, the internet, and the mobile phone,” computer pioneer, billionaire and thought leader, Bill Gates said earlier this year.
AI’s uses range from personalised shopping, fraud prevention, and personalised learning, to groundbreaking work on medicine and surgery, education, and manufacturing to gimmicky uses such as the AI-generated images offered free online.
Local AI engineers are working on various applications to solve the country’s development challenges and meet citizens’ aspirations. With a bigger development and needs gap, the potential for AI is immense.
Tavonga Muchuchuti, co-director of five-year-old local AI firm, Xavier Africa, speaks to Mmegi on what this new computer science is, and how it is being applied in the country. Xavier Africa held a high-profile launch last week, announcing its arrival as one of the country’s first AI engineering firms.
Mmegi: Would you kindly brief us on who Xavier is and where it’s coming from?
Muchuchuti: We are a company that believes that innovation is in Africa’s DNA, that as Africans, we made the first fire and drew the first drawings, but along the way, through the first, second and third industrial revolutions, we were not involved. We have been missing in action in history as Africans.
The foundation of Xavier Africa is about restoring the pride of African innovation. We are not going to sit on the sidelines and watch ourselves get passed.
Mmegi: What is AI and where does it come from?
Muchuchuti: The field of AI, people say, started in the 1960s at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University in the United States and the idea has been how to give computers a level of intelligence to do different tasks that people can do. It started with very simple problems such as being able to differentiate between a cat and a dog. Computers ‘think’ in terms of zeros and ones, so how do you ‘train’ a computer to be able to differentiate that? It took large sets of data, involving hundreds of thousands of cat and dog images, using a model of classification or otherwise, and the AI model starts to learn the attributes common amongst all dogs or cats.
Tomorrow because of the training it has gone through, the computer should be able to tell based on the attributes it has learnt. That was a simple idea of AI and machine learning, but things have developed to the top neural networks; from those cats and dogs, we are now looking at simulating the way the human brain thinks. Engineers look at the way the human brain makes decisions and try to model that.
In 2016, Google revolutionised AI with the Transformers which changed how we think about AI and led to ChatGPT.
Mmegi: From computer literacy to cost of access, people cite so many reasons why Africa is behind in innovating around the Internet in general. Is AI an opportunity to jump on or is the gap just getting wider?
Muchuchuti: At the moment, a lot of innovation is still coming from the West, with the US leading as well as China close behind. Historically, from the foundations of AI, it was created by Stanford and MIT universities, but in the last 10 to 15 years, Africa has started to participate in this and now we are starting to look at how to solve our own problems using this.
We are still behind but I believe that over the next five to six years, we are going to have faster adoption than anywhere else in the world because we have deeper problems that we have to solve than anywhere else in the world.
Mmegi: Any examples of AI moving in Botswana?
Muchuchuti: Around 2018, together with some friends, we started an e-commerce store for buying online called Buy BDub and we were able to see for ourselves that people had difficulties accessing that. They could not buy online because they had no data bundles.
Our philosophy changed to say let’s bring things closer to people, such as what one entrepreneur did with USSD (text message) and they have leveraged that to get their services closer to people. We have used the WhatsApp chatbot because Botswana has a high number of WhatsApp users; WhatsApp chatbot is low enough AI for customers to interact with.
SmartBots has also provided an additional layer, making sure there is Wi-Fi access in key areas such as dikgotla, which helps us to be able to create beyond the WhatsApp chatbot and develop more tools. That will increase the levels of adoption in the country.
Mmegi: Where are the opportunities for AI in Botswana?
Muchuchuti: The biggest opportunity that AI can solve in Botswana is medicine and this also goes for the region and the continent. We have a huge shortage of health specialists and that means we have to create tools that augment these skills and provide help to more people.
One big area is computer vision where the technology can be used to be able to detect cervical cancer from a picture. From the training of the machine, it can be able to say “how cervical cancer looks like at an early stage”. We can unlock a whole new set of opportunities and optimise the time management of the few specialists we have.
Mmegi: Can AI’s development in Botswana work without government i.e. B2B, or does it depend on state interest and support?
Muchuchuti: If we have to be very honest, Botswana has managed to solve a lot of infrastructure gaps that we have had a tech industry for a long time. We needed connectivity for up to 80% of the population in order to be viable, and now we have more than 90%. We also needed a support structure of experts who would be able to help us build real and viable industries. The Botswana Digital and Innovation Hub has provided those experts to guide, shape, and help us build meaningful businesses.
So from the state side, in terms of support, the government has built the ecosystem for us and while generally, government is the biggest player in the market, these solutions solve real problems and we are seeing an uptake of our products from telecommunications companies, the banking sector and others. It’s about improving service delivery and enhancing efficiencies.
Mmegi: Various economic sectors and actors in the developed world see AI as a threat. How do we tap into it when our own economic sectors and actors are generally less developed than the first world?
Muchuchuti: Right now, there’s a crisis all over the world because there’s a huge gap between the people creating the AI and the regulators. US Vice President Kamala Harris recently called a meeting to say “we need to collaborate to coordinate against the dangers of AI”.
Because of the fast adoption of AI and because of the launch of ChatGPT, there is a lot of catch-up learning and we are engaging with the regulators to make sure that we have responsible AI in the country.
If we don’t guard against this, there will obviously be abuse, such as voice-imitating AI being used during elections.
However, these fears should not stop innovation. We have to allow room to innovate and create around AI.