DURING A TRIP home to Johannesburg, South Africa, while completing an engineering master\u2019s program in Japan, Pelonomi Moiloa attended the largest machine learning community gathering she\u2019d ever seen in Africa, just a few miles from where she grew up. In all, 600 people from 22 nations attended 2017\u2019s Deep Learning Indaba, held at the University of Witwatersrand, discussing topics like health care and agriculture solutions custom-made to meet the needs of African people.<\/p>\n
That week-long gathering made Moiloa feel she could have an impact on the lives of Africans, and it helped convince her to move back to South Africa and look for a way to put her engineering skills to work on her home continent. \u201cThe conversations were around making a genuine impact and positive change in African lives on a mass scale, and that was something I really wanted to be a part of,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
This month, Moiloa will join some organizers of Deep Learning Indaba to launch Lelapa, a commercial and industrial AI research company focused on serving the needs of the 1 billion people in Africa. The cofounders hope the startup can develop into a magnet for top African AI talent, somewhat like the way top AI brains have for years been drawn to the deeply resourced labs of OpenAI, the startup and Microsoft partner behind ChatGPT, or Google\u2019s DeepMind.<\/p>\n
Lelapa aims to convince Africans like Moiloa to quit jobs overseas and return, and it aims to do this by working on problems African AI researchers care about, and by allowing them to work closer to the people and places important to them. \u201cWe speak to many of these people and they do want to come back, but they want the opportunities, and that’s the gap we\u2019re trying to fill,\u201d says Benjamin Rosman, who runs an AI lab at the University of Witwatersrand with another Lelapa cofounder, Pravesh Ranchod.<\/p>\n
The company is backed by the Mozilla Foundation and Atlantica Ventures and has raised $2.5 million in funding. Individual investors include Google\u2019s AI chief, Jeff Dean, a vocal supporter of Deep Learning Indaba, and Karim Beguir, CEO of startup Instadeep, acquired by pharma company BioNTech for $682 million last month.<\/p>\n
Lelapa plans to make money by building AI for African businesses and nonprofits, which the founders say have needs that aren\u2019t always easily met by US-centric AI technology. Initial projects include building a financial services and literacy bot for a South African bank, machine translation to connect mothers with health care professionals, and text mining to support the group Open Restitution Africa\u2019s work on returning artifacts in overseas museums to their native lands.<\/p>\n
Lelapa plans to train models on languages from southern Africa that are not high on Silicon Valley priority lists, to power translation and other forms of automated text processing. That would have applications in communications, education, and business.<\/p>\n
University of Pretoria data science chair Vukosi Marivate, another cofounder, says the company is an attempt to start building technology that puts African needs and values first, instead of relying on a handful of overseas tech companies. \u201cWe don\u2019t want to be left behind,\u201d Marivate says. \u201cIn technological revolutions, those left behind pay a big price as a society.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Lelapa is building a research lab to serve African businesses and nonprofits, with the hope that locally grown algorithms can better serve communities.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12963,"featured_media":25854,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,21],"tags":[7,26,22],"class_list":{"0":"post-25857","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-news","8":"category-technology","9":"tag-apie-project","10":"tag-news","11":"tag-technology"},"yoast_head":"\n