The announcement of a N100 million AI Fund by the Minister of Communications, Innovation, and Digital Economy, Dr. Bosun Tijani, has sparked negative reactions and strong criticism from the Nigerian tech community.
Their criticism of the initiative backed by Google is premised on the amount involved which is considered insignificant to make any impact in AI development in Nigeria.
Some argue that an individual startup receives up to $350,000 from Google initiatives while Nigeria as a whole wants to spend about $60,000 to fund many startups.
Nairametrics can confirm that under the Google for Startups Accelerator Africa program targeted at AI innovators, each selected startup equity-free $350,000 allocation in Google Cloud Credits.
The reactions
Reacting to the Minister’s post announcing the Fund on X, formerly Twitter, the Chief Executive Officer of Educare, an edtech startup, Alex Onyia, berated the amount involved in the initiative.
“N100m cannot even buy Nvidia chip used for Ai development. This is mere $61k in today’s naira which is not up to the annual salary of a proper Ai engineer.
“Let’s stop deceiving ourselves in this Nigeria. Unless it’s just using GPT4 or Gemini API’s which doesn’t require PR to use. Almost every mid-level software engineer in Nigeria uses that already,” he said.
https://x.com/winexviv/status/1833559346162094094
Another member of the tech community identified as Jerry U. said in response to the Minister’s announcement:
“My startup got a $200k grant from Google, all communications were through email. But here we are launching an “AI fund” and throwing a party for 60k$.
“May I ask you, what kind of AI research can be done with $60k even if the whole fund was granted to a single startup?”
https://x.com/1Mr_Styler/status/1833761203379642394
For Gideon Ajose, while he applauded the efforts of the Minister, the fund was just too small to be announced by the Minister.
“Honestly, I applaud your efforts but this will not even move a needle in the AI needs of Nigeria.
“And it’s hurtful because if you weren’t in government and you were practicing privately, you’d never announce this. This is not enough to get started, we are too far behind!” he said.
https://x.com/theGideonAjose/status/1833608748742357418
Another stakeholder identified as Citizen Olu noted that while the initiative was good, N100 million would not make any impact on AI in Nigeria.
“AI requires not just deep learning algorithms and vast amounts of data to train but also the hardware systems powered by POWERFUL networked GPUs and other massive computational cores produced by companies like NVIDIA and CEREBRAS. The cost of these systems is exorbitant without adding the cost of data scientists, AI specialists, etc.” he said.
https://x.com/jagabanolu/status/1833645066231189664
Backstory
The Communications Ministry in collaboration with Google on Tuesday unveiled the N100 million AI Fund aimed at supporting Nigerian startups that are leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI) to develop innovative solutions.
According to the Minister, the AI Fund is open to Nigerian-based startups that are focused on AI-driven technology solutions with the potential for significant impact.
Selected startups will receive up to N10 million in funding, along with access to Google’s extensive resources, including AI tools, mentorship, and a global network designed to help them scale their innovations.
What you should know
While the AI phenomenon is spreading across the globe, industry analysts have cited high cost of training models as a factor that would limit the participation of several countries.
For instance, a recent report by Stanford University revealed that the high cost of training AI models is limiting the involvement of non-industry actors in the technology revolution.
According to the Artificial Intelligence Index Report 2024, while AI companies seldom reveal the expenses involved in training their models, it is widely believed that these costs run into millions of dollars and are rising.
Citing OpenAI as an instance, the company’s CEO, Sam Altman, last year mentioned that the training cost for GPT-4 was over $100 million.
Safe Superintelligence (SSI), a newly established artificial intelligence startup co-founded by Ilya Sutskever, the former chief scientist of OpenAI, recently raised a whopping $1 billion in funding to develop AI safety.
