Likhwa Tech

Can Africa’s AI Ecosystem Thrive Without a Facebook or Google Equivalent? Is a Homegrown Giant Necessary for Growth? Over the past few weeks, I've spent my spare time posting short tutorials about AI and startups on my WhatsApp status, mainly for my contacts. The goal is to encourage people to get involved in tech. However, it often feels like I'm selling a pipe dream. Most people here don’t have the luxury to pursue speculative projects. Many are focused on survival and immediate returns. That tension got me thinking about a bigger question: can Africa truly build a self-sustaining AI ecosystem without producing at least one globally influential tech giant of its own? I've also heard countless people tell African founders to focus on solving "African problems." While this sounds noble, I’ve often wondered: what exactly are African problems, and who decides the limits of what Africans are allowed to build? I’m fascinated by the work that people like M...

The paper Reimagining Artificial General Intelligence: A Human-Centric Approach presents a new vision for the development of AGI systems. In this paper, I propose a redefinition of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) as: a system capable of independently understanding, learning, and performing a wide range of intellectual tasks that a human can, while proactively interacting with humans in a natural, adaptive, and context-aware manner, across multiple modalities and environments. This summary provides an overview of the paper's key insights and takeaways The pursuit of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) has long been driven by a singular question: what does it mean to create truly intelligent machines? As we stand at the threshold of a new era in AI development, it's clear that the answer to this question will have far-reaching implications for the future of human-AI collaboration. This paper proposes a human-centric approach to AGI, prioritizing interaction, adaptability...

Why We Need a Human-Centric Redefinition of Artificial General Intelligence A few weeks ago, I started working on Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). At the time, I wasn’t entirely sure where the road would lead—I was just curious. AGI, after all, is considered the next frontier in AI, something that goes beyond what we see in current systems. However, unlike previous technological advancements, I didn’t want to be a spectator in that future; I wanted to be involved, to be an active player—an architect—helping to shape what that future would look like. AGI promises to be something that can think, learn, and adapt across a broad range of domains—more like a human mind, as opposed to the narrow, task-specific AI we’re familiar with today. But as I dug deeper into AGI, I realized something important: as things stand, no one really knows what AGI will look like. To truly build it, we need to start with the basics—a vision. Most definitions of AGI out there focus on the idea of mimic...

Sometime last year (2023), when the ChatGPT buzz was at its peak, I tried to visit the OpenAI site to check it out. Unfortunately, I couldn't access it due to location restrictions. Frustrated, I decided to build my own chatbot. I figured I'd focus on local languages, starting with my mother tongue. This sparked my curiosity about how such platforms work. I began researching and soon realized I needed a large dataset to train a model. However, there's a scarcity of isiNdebele content online. Faced with this challenge and my constraints, I decided to take a different approach. From the onset, I knew that, as impressive as current chatbots and AI tools are, they represent just the beginning of the AI race. These tools are currently at their worst and can only improve over time. The future direction is uncertain, and I believe no one truly knows where it’s headed. With my foot in the game, even on the smallest scale, I figured i could reimagine the future, create a vision of i...