Africa Is Building an A.I. Industry That Doesn’t Look Like Silicon Valley
Researchers want to pave their own path. But the growing industry is still dependent on tech giants like Google and Microsoft.
In late August, under the shade of an arching pepper tree in Nairobi, Kenya, hundreds of A.I. researchers gossiped about their algorithms. Some stood in front of posters, which wound around the tree’s sprawling roots, depicting machine learning systems that promised to predict everything from soil nutrition, to whether a small-scale farmer would repay a loan, to how a self-driving car might navigate the bustling streets of Cairo.
Over the last three years, academics and industry researchers from around the African continent have begun sketching the future of their own A.I. industry at a conference called Deep Learning Indaba. The conference brings together hundreds of researchers from more than 40 African countries to present their work, and discuss everything from natural language processing to A.I. ethics.
Founded in 2017, Indaba is a direct response to Western academic conferences, which are often difficult for researchers from distant parts of the world to access. Take, for instance, the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, the most well-known…
