2023-10-13 09:39:55
Pelonomi Moiloa, a South African scientist, has only one goal: to improve the quality of life of Africans through technology.
“AI for Africans, by Africans, solving African problems.” » This is the message that appears on Lelapa AI site, which means “house” in Sotho and Tswana. Co-founder and CEO of the company, Pelonomi Moiloa is one of the first African entrepreneurs to focus on the development of artificial intelligence products. Greeted by the Time in her top of the most influential people in artificial intelligencePelonomi Moiloa is convinced that technology can contribute to the development of the continent.
Fighting bias in AI models
“Lelapa AI was founded because experience has shown us that when we import models developed in the West to deploy them in the African context, they often fail. Sometimes, not only does this technology not work, but it is harmful,” explains the thirty-year-old to average The country. According to her, the risks detected in AI biases in the rest of the world are even more dangerous in Africa. “The legacy of apartheid in South Africa caused some people to live, for the most part, in certain areas. “So when you use location in a credit model to determine whether someone is eligible for a mortgage, race may actually come into play,” she says. “A bias in this direction was not introduced, but the model learned it from the information provided to it. »
Thanks to these mechanisms, technology absorbs social bias and perpetuates “power structures and violence, and with them, discrimination “. To combat these biases, the founder of Lelapa AI engages in a constructive approach: “There is a very conscious process about the type of data we put into the machine. Instead of having a ChatGPT that looks at the entire internet and includes all the terrible opinions that we don’t want to know about, we are able to moderate, to some extent, what that machine is exposed to. We decide what is right and what is wrong. This means that there is a filter that we train the machine with, which includes parts of our culture and heritage. » The entrepreneur refers to the introduction of African languages in the training of AI linguistic models, but also to content linked to the philosophies and worldviews of the continent.
Promote the cultural wealth of the continent
One of its main concerns is to ending the invisibility of African languages in technology. “We need our languages to be represented, because they have a wide variety of specificities and nuances. We need to decolonize technology and align it with the archives of our history, our languages and the data we use to power these tools,” she says. With this in mind, Lelapa AI launched the VulaVula project, which focuses on natural language processing. A technology used in particular in automatic translation systems or voice assistants, and which allows a machine to “understand” and interact using human language. VulaVula offers language support for any automated service in underrepresented languages, starting with Zulu, Xhosa, Sesotho and Afrikaans.
A risky bet
If the researcher sees AI as a formidable development lever for Africa, she does not hide her concerns about the challenges and threats that this technology entails. “Again, most of the natural resources needed to produce this new technology are found in Africa. For example, the European Union counts among its main suppliers of raw materials considered critical (bauxite, tantalum, iridium, ruthenium or rhodium) African countries such as Guinea, the Democratic Republic of Congo or South Africa. We know that since For more than 100 years, Africa has been plundered to extract our resources, to make them as cheap as possible. And to think that these resources are going to be even more precious worries me a lot. There will be international actors interested in promoting instability. I don’t know how we can protect ourselves from it, but we have to,” warns the entrepreneur.
“The African experience can be a model for the rest of the world”
Aware of the risks, Pelonomi Moiloa nevertheless remains enthusiastic about the field of possibilities. She discusses uses in agriculture, the South African MomConnect initiative, which improves access to health care for pregnant women, but also its use in microfinance, which is very widespread on the African continent. The entrepreneur recognizes that there are challenges (Internet connection, energy production or the reach of technology in remote areas…) but believes that Africa can serve as an example: “The experience Africa can be a model for the rest of the world, showing that huge machines, which require a lot of energy and millions of dollars of investment, are not necessary to create something significant. I honestly believe that AI has the potential to help make the future better for more people. There is no other choice. Faced with problems like climate change, for example, and social instability, which affect everyone, we need tools to help humans become better humans. AI can do this because it is a powerful tool. »
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