Mutembei Kariuki’s Post

I look forward to moderating a discussion on the intersection of AI and Blockchain for Africa’s economic prosperity at Kenya Blockchain and Crypto Conference 2024 next week from the 6th - 7th June 2024 Nairobi, Kenya. This was also a topic Vitalik Buterin talked about at length during the Coinbase machine learning and blockchain research summit 2024. Africa missed out on the last 3 Industrial Revolution and the result is where we are today. The emerging technologies driven by cryptography and artificial intelligence present opportunities to unlock Africa’s potential if we embrace them. Zero-Knowledge Machine learning for privacy and sovereign AI, agent based smart contract execution, tokenization of real world assets, identifying deepfakes to protect democracy, decentralized AI these are some of the topics to dive into. Join us next week through this link https://lnkd.in/eXVDji8h #ai #blockchain #cryptography

Over the weekend, I had the opportunity to speak to high school students from across Kenya at the Rotary International Club of Nairobi and Rotaract clubs of Nairobi Central, United States International University - Africa, KCA University at The Annual Career's Garage session themed around AI & Tech It was inspiring engaging with high school students from Mpesa Academy, Starehe Boy's Centre, Alliance High Schools, Kenya High School, Lenana School, Loreto Convent, Mukuru Transformers secondary school, and many others. Their curiosity and knowledge about how AI will impact their future work made me realize the real concerns and opportunities they see regarding what careers they should study for. They are also the generation with the most access to educational content to upskill themself, for free in many cases, only requiring access to the internet. They were excited when I shared with them DeepLearning.AI and introduced them to Andrew Ng's work. I'm still full of optimism about the next generation of African youth as they leverage AI to build the future. Thank you to the Rotary Club of Nairobi and the Rotaract Clubs for the invite. #africa #youth #ai #rotary

His company was acquired for $3.4 billion after investors told him Africa was not a viable mobile phone market. Mo Ibramin who later set up the Mo Ibrahim Foundation saw the opportunity in Africa and went on to start Celtel International B.V. which was later acquired for about $3.4 billion in 2005. Today, we are reaping the benefits of his belief in emerging technology working in Africa. Today, mobile money that leverages the mobile phone network moved almost $1 trillion of value in 2023 in Africa. https://lnkd.in/dhMvw4QK I believe the same goes for other emerging technologies such as AI and Web3. Watch his interview below on CNBC. He ends the interview with one message of advice to his younger self that can be the same advice to young African entrepreneurs, "Be brave". https://lnkd.in/d7MWdHrD #ai

Excited to announce that I will be speaking at the African Development Bank Group Annual Meeting in Nairobi representing Fastagger! Join us on 28th May 2024 at 17:30 GMT+3 at KICC, Mount Kenya / Tent 1. We’ll discuss building and financing Africa’s AI ecosystem with leaders from the US and African private sectors, and government officials. David Lemayian #AI #Africa #Innovation #AfDBAM2024 Scan the QR code to register.

We try to imagine and build for how the world might be in the future at Fastagger The advances in AI and the Tech space have outpaced many people's imaginations and the tools on a mobile phone today would seem like magic if someone time-traveled from 50 years ago to today. On Saturday, I will speak at the annual career garage hosted by the Rotary Club of Nairobi and the Rotaract clubs of Nairobi Central, USIA-A, and KCA University to a group of high school and university students. I can only imagine the world of work they will enter in another 5-15 years. How do we prepare them for the future of work?

Inspired by Africa, globally focused. Fastagger's work on on-device privacy preserving small language models for low power and low connectivity environments on the edge was highlighted at The AI Expo for National Competitiveness 2024 in Washington D.C. The first expo in the US dedicated to AI competitiveness as part of the Special Competitive Studies Project - SCSP https://www.scsp.ai/. Many thanks to Dr. Shikoh Gitau for being a steward of AI innovation and to Alliance4ai https://lnkd.in/dQ3cxPMf ML/AI has practical real-world applications in emerging markets that can create sustainable development and be exported globally. While there is the race to AGI we are talking about practical ML/AI that can solve SME, healthcare, climate resilience, space, and education challenges globally. Watch here https://lnkd.in/dydpF2pU #ai #aiforgood #sustainabledevelopment

Benin has an average age of 17 years old. 45% of the population is under 14 years, a massive young population dividend. It has been great to see the stewardship of Aurelie I. ADAM SOULE Minister of Digital Economy and Communication in Benin towards channeling this opportunity of talent towards AI. Yesterday, was a showcase of AI innovations particularly in NLP for local languages in Benin built by Beninese 🇧🇯 youth particularly realtime speech to speech translation supported by https://asin.bj/ Moustapha Cisse gave a great keynote about how innovation is somehow never seen as linear with his example of how all of media was predicting how world would be covered in horse dung when horse drawn carts were the main means of transport and how Henry Ford’s Model T changed all that. Technology brings solutions. Benin is a representation of how good political leadership in Africa can unlock the entrepreneurial talent in AI by investing in the young population.

I'm in Benin at the invitation of GSMA and the Minister of Digital Economy and Communication in Benin to participate at the Salon de l'Entrepreneuriat Numérique et de l'Intelligence Artificielle (SENiA)/ Digital Entrepreneurship and Artificial Intelligence Exhibition (SENiA) and launch of the Benin Digital Economy Report themed ‘Driving Economic Growth through Digital Transformation’. https://senia.bj/ I had the opportunity to visit the monument erected to honor the famous Dahomey Amazons of the Dahomey Empire in present-day Benin. This was a group of all-female warriors. They were the only female army in modern history after the famous Amazons of Greek Mythology. https://lnkd.in/ddYpt8WR The inscription on the monument translated from French said: "A symbol of our love and our commitment to the country, our Amazons were able, through their bravery, as much as men, to defend the homeland. Like our Amazons, the Beninese woman is our pride Patrice T’alon, 2022 The Women leading SMEs in Africa in many ways are the continent's modern Amazons. Female entrepreneurship has been on the rise across sub-Saharan Africa. According to the World Bank, 58 % of all African small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are women-owned. SMEs account for 95% of all registered businesses and contribute about 50% to the total GDP of sub-Saharan countries. That is over $1.5 trillion. https://lnkd.in/dg5HKTpe Our work at Fastagger is supporting these women SMEs to harness ML/AI to grow their businesses and grow Africa. Thank you to Dr. Shikoh Gitau and the team at Qhala for making this possible as we continue to work together to bring the benefits of responsible AI to Africa.