OpinionAI in Africa · Opinion
The Press Releases Promise African-Language AI. The Data Pipeline Is the Real Product.
Tether's 0.8B-parameter TranslatePsy-AfriSLM beat models up to 150x larger at African translation, and the trick was deleting 96% of low-quality training data. Google's WAXAL took three years to record 11,000 hours of speech across 21 languages. In African-language AI, the data pipeline is the product. Benchmarks still cover only 52 of 2,000+ languages.
Ibrahim Denis Fofanah·Oct 7, 2026·9 min
