Several are. Lelapa AI's InkubaLM is a small language model covering five African languages; Awarri is building Nigeria's first national LLM by crowdsourcing training data; and InstaDeep, founded in Tunis, built decision-making AI that flagged over 90 percent of WHO COVID variants before they were named.
The common thread is building for what the giants skip: African languages, local data, and problems that matter on the continent.
Cassava Technologies is adding the compute layer beneath them, installing Africa's first AI factory of 3,000 GPUs.