AI Growth in Africa: Innovations and Challenges

Catherine Nzuki is joined by Dr. Chinasa T. Okolo, a fellow in the Center for Technology Innovation in the Governance Studies program at Brookings and a recent computer science Ph.D. graduate from Cornell University.

Dr. Okolo provides an overview of Africa’s AI industry (1:54); DeepSeek and what it means for AI startups (6:40); common misconceptions about AI development (7:54); how to make AI safer for the global majority (14:22); the AI safety landscape in Africa (16:52); developing benchmarks to measure AI safety in Africa (19:05); why reforming existing data governance is a pathway to AI regulation (21:50); ethical approaches to developing language models (25:00); the exploitation of workers that train and label AI models (27:00); and leveraging available language models to build African language models (35:00). 

Dr. Okolo’s AI safety initiative: A new writing series: Re-envisioning AI safety through global majority perspectives.

February 19 event on AI Safety at Brookings: Globalizing Perspectives on AI Safety