Entrepreneurs are cultivating generative AI from the west coast of Africa to the eastern edge of the Arabian Desert.
Gen AI is the latest of the big plans Kofi Genfi and Nii Osae have been hatching since they met 15 years ago in high school in Accra, Ghana's capital that sits on the Gulf of Guinea.
We watched this latest wave of AI coming for the last few years, said Osae, a software engineer who discovered his passion for machine learning in college.
Nii Osae (left) and Kofi Genfi of startup Mazzuma. So, late last year, they expanded Mazzuma - their mobile-payments startup that's already processed more than $150 million in transactions - to include MazzumaGPT.
The large language model (LLM) trained on two popular blockchain languages so it can help developers quickly draft smart contracts, a Web3 market that International Data Corp. projects could hit $19 billion next year.
Thousands of Hits In its first month, 400 developers from 70 countries used the LLM that sports 175 billion parameters, a rough measure of a model's size and strength.
https://blogs.nvidia.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/MazzumaGPT-Chainlink.mp4
It's the latest success for the pair that in 2018 made Forbes' list of 30 top entrepreneurs in Africa under 30.
Given the high growth and large demographics, there are big opportunities in this region, said Genfi, who started his first company, an Apple device reseller, when he was 19.
Osae nurtures that potential as founder and chair of the 100+ member AI Association of Ghana. I think we're on a trajectory to leapfrog progress elsewhere, he said.
LLMs Speak Arabic About two years ago and 6,000 miles to the northeast, another pair of entrepreneurs launched a generative AI business in the Persian Gulf emirate of Dubai, home of the Burj Khalifa, the world's tallest building.
Yakov Livshits already had about a dozen active startups when AI researcher Eli Braginskiy, a friend with family ties, came to him with the idea for MetaDialog. The startup built the first LLM to support both Arabic and English, a 7-billion-parameter model trained on one of the world's largest Arabic/English datasets.
We call it Baby, because we're proud of it, and we're building a larger, 40-billion parameter model now, said Braginskiy.
https://blogs.nvidia.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/MetaDialog-Baby-demo-final.mp4
Our Baby LLM is currently integrated in one of the biggest governments in the region, and we're talking with three other governments interested in using it, too, said Livshits.
With more than 3 million people in just 13 square miles, Dubai is a vibrant hub for the region.
The way governments in the Middle East think about AI and advanced tech in general is very bold - they want to move fast, so we're training custom models in different languages and will present them at the GITEX conference said Livshits, who lived in Russia, Israel and the U.S. before moving to Dubai.
In February, Saudi Arabia alone announced a $2.4 billion startup fund to help diversify the nation's economy.
Corporations Want Custom LLMs In Abu Dhabi, just a hundred miles down the coast, Hussein Al-Natsheh leads a team of engineers and data scientists at Beyond Limits training and fine tuning LLMs. One is already drafting documents for a large energy company and verifying they comply with its standards.
Beyond Limits also works on models for energy companies, utilities and other customers that will index and search corporate documents, draft marketing materials and more.
Companies need their own LLMs trained on their own data which is confidential, so we have machines reading their data, not us, said Al-Natsheh, a native of Amman, Jordan, who, prior to joining Beyond Limits, worked on Salma, one of the first Arabic speech assistants.
Drilling for Data Now that data is the new oil, Beyond Limits is developing toolkits to extract it from unstructured files - corporate emails, PowerPoint and other sources - so it can help companies train custom LLMs approaching 70 billion parameters in size.
The toolkits can help address the lack of data samples from the many Arabic dialects. Indeed, a report from the UAE government on 100 top gen AI uses called for more work on Arabic, a language spoken by nearly half a billion people.
The good news is governments and large companies like G42, a regional cloud service company, are pouring resources into the problem. For example, Beyond Limits was able to create its regional headquarters in Dubai thanks to its last funding round, much of which came from G42.
A Big Boost from Inception All three companies are members of NVIDIA Inception, a free program that helps startups working on cutting-edge technologies like generative AI.
As part of Inception, Beyond Limits had access to libraries in NVIDIA NeMo, a framework for building massive gen AI models, and which cut training time in one case from five days to one.
NVIDIA software makes our work much easier, and our clients trust NVIDIA technology, said Al-Natsheh.
As part of Inception, Mazzuma got access to cloud GPU services to accelerate its experiments and introductions to potential investors.
That really gave us a boost, and there's a lot of assurance that comes from working with the best people and tools, said Genfi.
Treating Partners Well For its part, MetaDialog trained its Baby LLM on 440 NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs using a service operated by MosaicML, an Inception member recently acquired by Databricks.
I've built many startups, and no company treats its partners as well as NVIDIA, said Livshits.
At top: From left to right, Nii Osae, Hussein Al-Natsheh, Eli Braginskiy, Yakov Livshits and Kofi Genfi.
Most recent headlines
06/10/2025
France T l visions, France's leading broadcaster, has received the 2025 EBU ...
04/09/2025
Monumental Sports & Entertainment (MSE), in collaboration with Dalet, has been a...
30/08/2025
WASHINGTON The Federal Communications Commission has adopted its FY 2025 Regulatory Fees Order that establishes the regulatory fee rates for the broadcast stati...
29/08/2025
Australian Red Cross and SBS launch training to help workplaces in the fight aga...
29/08/2025
The National Film and Video Foundation (NFVF), an agency of the Department of Sp...
29/08/2025
L3Harris Technologies has concentrated decades of expertise across the entire enterprise to develop affordable and reliable best-of-breed solutions to rapidly c...
29/08/2025
BURBANK, Calif. The CW Network and the Pac-12 Conference have announced a new media rights deal that will extend their broadcast partnership beginning with the ...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK Gracenote has released a new analysis of its global video dataset showing that the number of FAST channels grew nearly 14% from Q1 2025 and 76% since 2...
29/08/2025
SAN JOSE, Calif. Harmonic has announced a series of improvements to its live sports streaming solution that the company said will improve fan engagement, protec...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK and LOS ANGELES Fox Corp. and YouTube TV last night announced a renewal of the full portfolio of Fox networks, including Fox News Channel, Fox Business...
29/08/2025
Budapest, Hungary, August 2025 - The integration of Microsoft Teams Rooms (MTR) with Lightware's Taurus universal matrix switchers delivers a new level of f...
29/08/2025
Frequency, the engine behind many of the world's best-known streaming television channels, today announced it will launch Studio Live, a next-generation uni...
29/08/2025
In an era when AI and cyber resilience are essential, Scality will mark the 10th anniversary of Scality Day on October 16, 2025 in Paris. This flagship global e...
29/08/2025
Disguise's In-House Creative and Technical Teams Pre-Visualised, Programmed and Delivered Content for the Experience, All Powered by EX 3+
Technology solu...
29/08/2025
Disguise will be demonstrating the latest workflows for TV, film and live events on a number of partner booths at the show
Disguise, the industry-leading tech...
29/08/2025
STOCKHOLM, Sweden Accedo will showcase Accedo Compose, its AI agent-powered modular orchestration layer that assists streaming providers in transitioning client...
29/08/2025
LOS ANGELES Cineverse has announced that it is working with Xperi to bring four of its streaming channels to automobiles for the first time as part of the DTS A...
29/08/2025
DALLAS & ATLANTA Gray Media has announced an agreement with the sports streaming service Victory+ to simulcast 17 Dallas Stars NHL games in 15 television market...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK AND CULVER CITY Comcast NBCUniversal and Amazon have announced new and extended distribution agreements that will expand the content available on their...
29/08/2025
FOOTHILL RANCH, Calif. RED Digital Cinema will feature its Cine-Broadcast Module supporting live broadcast workflows during IBC2025, Sept. 12-15, at the RAI Ams...
29/08/2025
29 Aug 2025
Kyivstar Rings Opening Bell at Nasdaq Marking Landmark Listing and ...
29/08/2025
More than half of all NFL games live on Sky for the first timeFriday 29 August 2025
Sky Sports has announced a new three-year deal with the NFL, extending its ...
29/08/2025
Back to All News
RIV4LRIES: The Trailer of the New Series With Samuele Carrino ...
29/08/2025
Get ready for an inspiring and emotional insight into the world of competitive Irish dancing with My Story: Tomi Champion of the World airing on RT 2 this monda...
29/08/2025
RT has today announced that David McCullagh is to be the new presenter of RT Radio 1's flagship Today programme, which airs every weekday at 10am, replaci...
28/08/2025
By Kristin Feeley, Director, Documentary Film & Artist Programs
If you want to tell untold stories, if you want to give voice to the voiceless, you've got ...
28/08/2025
Directed by Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert, Sundance Institute-supported Amer...
28/08/2025
Corridos have been a cornerstone of M sica Mexicana for generations, telling stories rooted in everyday life. Now, a new chapter is taking shape: motivational c...
28/08/2025
Los corridos han sido un pilar de la M sica Mexicana durante generaciones, contando historias enraizadas en la vida cotidiana. Ahora, un nuevo cap tulo est tom...
28/08/2025
Earlier this month, we promised our Verano Forever party would bring the heat, a...
28/08/2025
L3Harris will provide the Polish F-16V fleet with the Viper Shield electronic warfare system as part of an upgrade program....
28/08/2025
Bilbao, August 26, 2025 - AgileTV, an international television and video technol...
28/08/2025
Ken Wilkinson is an Emmy Awards nominated New York audio engineer who specialises in production sound mixing for film, commercial, episodic and documentary work...
28/08/2025
NEW YORK FuboTV today announced that it will launch Fubo Sports, a skinny bundle that focuses on sports with a subscription price of $56 monthly....
28/08/2025
NEVADA City, Calif. At IBC2025, Sept. 12-15 at the RAI Amsterdam, Telestream will debut its new Global Ingest strategy, introducing a next-generation ingest arc...
28/08/2025
Dr. Rhoda Bernard Releases Groundbreaking Debut Book on Accessible Arts Educatio...
28/08/2025
TAG Video Systems, the leader in software-based IP end-to-end workflow monitoring, deep probing, and real-time visualization, has named Oliver Gappa as Sales Di...
28/08/2025
AI-based voice enhancement will be among a series of innovations making their IBC 2025 debut on the DHD stand B46 in Hall 8 at the RAI Amsterdam Convention Cent...
28/08/2025
Telef nica Servicios Audiovisuales (TSA), the leading system integrator and service provider in the media sector in Spain, with the support of Appear, the globa...
28/08/2025
To fully immerse sailing fans in the world's biggest offshore yacht race, production company, Optical Media turned to LiveU's On-site Production solutio...
28/08/2025
Working with Calrec on its most recent overhaul, radio and television broadcaster, WNED has migrated to a fully IP infrastructure with multiple Type R consoles,...
28/08/2025
Cleeng, the Subscriber Retention Management (SRM ) inventor, has unveiled Cleeng Pro, the first-ever direct-to-consumer (D2C) subscription management platform t...
28/08/2025
Zixi, the industry leader in live broadcast-quality video over IP, today announced that French media distribution platform OKAST has selected Zixi to enable rel...
28/08/2025
Solution offers a streamlined, speaker-free architecture to optimize integration with premium external loudspeakers and advanced loudness metering
Nixer Pro Au...
28/08/2025
Cinegy, the premier provider of software-defined television technology, has announced a strategic partnership with Vision One Touch Film Production Services L.L...
28/08/2025
Telestream, a global leader in media workflow technologies, will debut its new Global Ingest strategy at IBC2025, introducing a next-generation ingest architect...
28/08/2025
Tier 1 operator selects Broadpeak to power high-performance, unified CDN solution across Norway, Sweden and Finland
Broadpeak, a leader in streaming and moneti...
28/08/2025
Leading video software provider, Synamedia, today announced that 24 Frames Digital, one of India's leading live event streaming service providers, has chose...
28/08/2025
Meet VisualOn at IBC2025: See What's Next in AI-Powered Video Streaming Join VisualOn at IBC2025 and discover how our AI-driven Optimizer and advanced media...
Entrepreneurs are cultivating generative AI from the west coast of Africa to the eastern edge of the Arabian Desert.
