More than 500 fellows of the federal government’s 3 Million Technical Talent program have been hired by the Nigerian company Awarri, which was chosen to create the nation’s first artificial intelligence, as data collectors for the Large Language Multilingual Model.
This was revealed on Wednesday by Dr. Bosun Tijani, Minister of Communications, Innovation, and Digital Economy, who reiterated the government’s commitment to generating more tech-related employment for Nigerians.
“I’m glad to see the growth of the Awarri team since its launch in November 2023 to 120 staff, with an additional engagement of over 500 fellows from our 3MTTNigeria programme as data collectors, as they build Nigeria’s first Large Language Multilingual Model.
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“Looking forward to seeing more companies in the space as we slowly but surely build a technology workforce that will contribute to global AI development,” the Minister stated in a post on X Wednesday night.
According to the Minister, Awarri kicked off operations with 100 AI jobs in Ikorodu in November last year. He described the startup as a full-stack offering that ranges from data gathering to model creation and AI application development.
Tijani at the end of a 4-day AI workshop held in Abuja in April announced the launch of Nigeria’s first Multilingual Large Language Model (LLM).
According to him, the AI tool was launched through a partnership between a Nigerian AI company, Awarritech, a global tech company, DataDotOrg, the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), and the National Centre for AI and Robotics (NCAIR).
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“The LLM will be trained in 5 low resource languages and accented English to ensure stronger language representation in existing datasets for the development of Artificial Intelligence solutions. The project will also be supported by over 7,000 fellows from the 3MTT Nigeria program,” the Minister stated.
