Meet Kuda Musasiwa and the African AI bots, DanAI.chat and ZivAi

Kuda Musasiwa’s want to create an genuine, homegrown African AI is placing the Zimbabwean diaspora and the native computing neighborhood on the map.

Did you already know that aliens landed in Zimbabwe in 1994? Check out the Ariel School incident to seek out out about the most compelling shut extraterrestrial encounter on the continent. 

But only a few years earlier than the offworld guests got here to his nation, a younger expatriate Zimbo was feeling a bit like an alien himself. That was Kuda Musasiwa, who would later turn into the creator of the first pan-African AI bot. In the late 80’s, Musasiwa was bundled up by his pc scientist father and taken off to Australia the place his father was finding out. Musasiwa ended up in a neighborhood Catholic faculty and remembers fairly properly the feeling of being the “only black kid in an all-white environment.” At one level, the mother and father of the different kids protested Kuda’s attending swimming classes with their youngsters. He ended up splashing round in the pool on his personal, till Jody, a red-headed classmate, jumped in the water and broke the apartheid. “I always default to that memory because I saw the power of one person defying the rules. She was my Rosa Parks!” Musasiwa mentioned. 

It was in Australia that Musasiwa would have his eureka second after switching on his father’s Amstrad, studying prompts, MS DOS, and working GW BASIC. Then got here a Macintosh, on which he programmed his personal variations of Pong and discovered to jot down and debug code by making an attempt and doing. Like his father had achieved in Australia, he would later earn an MSc in Computer Science–at City, University of London. 

Before creating ZivAi, Musasiwa tried out fairly a couple of issues. His first foray into fostering a neighborhood to unite Zimbabweans throughout the diaspora was along with his web site,  blaz.co.uk. Musasiwa regrets by no means benefiting from how a lot this platform grew. “This really grew exponentially. We used to share the files we would talk about in the forums… sadly we never monetized it.” 

After the dotcom bubble burst, Musasiwa and his friends created an HTML program known as Checkmate, which might point out when their contacts had been on-line on AOL, MSN messenger, or ICQ, and extra. In all his forays into the digital world, Musasiwa by no means overlooked his main focus: the significance of the Zimbabwean diaspora and the native computing neighborhood. 

Twenty years and many startup tasks (together with a recent meals supply firm, Fresh In A Box) later, Musasiwa discovered himself confronting a state of affairs that will ultimately stimulate the start of ZivAi. The authentic inspiration got here from a want to create an genuine, homegrown African AI. Young techies and digital learners in Zimbabwe have lengthy suffered from an absence of entry to fundamental fee channels like PayPal and Stripe; likewise, different newer instruments of curiosity like ChatGPT typically elude them. Musasiwa views this lack of entry as unfair. As a everlasting resident of the United Kingdom, Musasiwa had realized years earlier than that he might use his personal entry to fee channels as a way to bridge the hole for youthful techies again in his dwelling nation. The imaginative and prescient of increasing entry to data is captured in the identify ZivAi, which is impressed by Musasiwa’s brother’s identify, which implies ‘Acquire Knowledge’ in Shona. 

Musasiwa subsequently created ZivAi to fulfill particular wants in Zimbabwe. Despite the spectacular abilities of the Zimbabwean youth,  the financial circumstances are such that this potential is at risk of being smothered. A hyperinflationary setting, sanctions and different limitations all imply that even funds from Zimbabweans in the diaspora battle to make their method into the palms of those that want them–and in the event that they do, remittance corporations apply particularly punishing prices. Within this context, establishing environment friendly fee channels and making a chatbot to help business distributors made a substantial amount of sense to Musasiwa. Though ZivAi incorporates a picture generator and loads of flamboyant UX, these are its main priorities.   

The ZivAi and the Danai.chat (pan-African) fashions are cobbled collectively from smaller open-source fashions and the “work of the giants,” in Musasiwa’s phrases. The ZivAi crew additionally just lately started to make use of Azure Open Source. Most performance is in English and French, however in line with Musasiwa, that can change. “We want to build sovereignty bit-by-bit,” he defined. At current, the off-chat layer is being laid down, and the query that the crew asks via the course of is: ‘Is this good enough for a child in a rural area to be able to converse with and do things with?’ The layer ought to be capable to clarify sufficient to native kids in their very own languages to assist them in doing their homework, at the very least, says the founder 

This underscores the tough technique of feeding the LLM African languages, first by way of queries and responses, and hopefully later in a lot bigger chunks of pure language. Facebook’s Meta has saved up an unlimited database of Shona and different languages, which it makes use of for AI-powered translation. That types a superb chance to coach the ZivAi mannequin to talk naturally in African tongues, which is able to imply negotiating entry to the datasets. As thrilling because it sounds, Musasiwa says that his crew “knows damn well that we are not important enough to get the attention of the Big Boys. We will spearhead everything ourselves.” 

Interestingly, ZivAi shouldn’t be Kuda’s first iteration of an AI: Shandu and Lucy (the latter named after the ‘First Human’ which stays unearthed in Africa) had been earlier bots that laid the groundwork, and finally  led to the creation of  the AfricAi Project. Shandu (which implies ‘Change’ in Shona) was a chatbot created for a political marketing campaign, whereas Lucy was utilized as customer support assist. Both had been based mostly on open-source fashions obtainable in 2018. Shandu’s candidate was unsuccessful in the elections, however throughout the pandemic, Lucy got here in useful when Fresh In A Box–the recent produce supply startup Musasiwa co-founded along with his spouse–confronted hundreds of queries.  But neither Lucy nor Shandu had capacities like the LLMs that burst onto the scene final yr. “When ChatGPT was launched I was in South Africa and I thought, ‘this is mind-blowing!’” Musasiwa mentioned. But when the API was launched, his fellow coders again dwelling in Zimbabwe couldn’t entry it. Many hadn’t even heard of it. 

Musasiwa was conversant in the code base, and so was capable of create ZivAi, not only for Zimbabweans, however for customers throughout Africa. According to him, he was spurred to motion by the indisputable fact that GenAI instruments merely don’t cater for Africans, are incapable of dealing with African languages and invariably draw white folks once they’re prompted to ‘Draw a person’. 

Within half a yr of its launch, ZivAi has hit 18,000 customers and 19,000 logins via LinkedIn and Twitter. The chatbot has been made obtainable on Apple and Android.  The ZivAi  crew can also be launching DanAi.chat, the ‘Pan-African Megabot’ that Musasiwa hopes will attraction to customers throughout the continent. The megabot is already on-line in beta testing and is ready to develop solely by word-of-mouth. All customers of the megabot should choose their African nation first, and the crew hopes it will result in the trickle impact of customers coaching it, thereby beginning the technique of localization for all 54 African nations. 

For this upcoming part, Musasiwa’s crew is searching for funding for a 3-month surge which is able to value $50,000. They are searching for to hit that aim primarily via crowdfunding (to again the undertaking, take a look at fund.africa.app). The extremely small sum for such an formidable GenAI undertaking reveals a sombre actuality–that the fundamental assets required to scale and develop are merely non-existent at dwelling. ZivAi/DanaAi.chat contains picture technology in addition to chat, covers all of Africa, and has revolutionary fee components constructed into it, each to pay for itself and to empower retailers in an ecosystem that Musasiwa hopes to construct round the bots. Building these bots is a critical enterprise, however one that can’t, it appears, be in-built the nation that it was first crafted for.

Musasiwa revealed that the complete ZivAi crew shared a flat in South Africa, and that cellular dev Ngoni had simply had his first scorching bathe; whereas Ngoni and Cyprian had taken their first-ever airplane journeys to get there. 

South Africa shouldn’t be with out its difficulties, together with huge energy outages, however fortunately, Musasiwa and his crew discovered a number along with his personal generator. There can also be  violent strife which regularly targets Zimbabwean outsiders. Choosing to construct an ecosystem in ‘exile’ there reasonably than his homeland reveals the obstacles that Musasiwa and different tech entrepreneurs face in Zimbabwe itself. Yet he believes firmly in the energy of AI to assist in agriculture and well being and 100 different areas during which Africans want tech to correctly utilise their true potential. Listening to Musasiwa run via issues and options with the similar ferocious power, one feels sure he received’t cease right here. “I’m optimistic that if we build something great, if people use it, we will gain traction and more will see it.”