TL;DR for this Update

• Kenya Proposes AI Law That Reaches Foreign Firms Like OpenAI and Meta

• Five Startups Bet Billions That the Transformer’s Time Is Up

• South Africa Wants to Use Machine Learning to Screen Travellers for Fraud

• Inside Anambra's "2.0" Plan: How Soludo's ICT Agency Wants AI, Not Just Wi-Fi, to Run Government

• SA's Deep-Tech Startup BIXIE Reports Early Traction Under FasterCapital's EquityPilot Programme

• Meta, Others Announce AI Academy to Strengthen AI Talent in Nigeria

• AMIE Demonstrates Real-Time Clinical Video Consultation Capabilities

• DeepMind Puts Sign Language AI Into Users' Hands

• Google Introduces Gemini 3.7 Flash

• Flock Tightens Its Rules in Response to Growing Surveillance Backlash

• Google Brings Spreadsheet Data to Life With Sheets Canvas

• Google Gets Fans Closer to the Game With Gemini and Pixel

• OpenAI Just Launched ChatGPT for Teens, But African Students Are Already Using It

• DeepSeek Ships V4-Pro to General Availability

• GLM-5.3 Scores 84.5% on CyberGym

• Lesotho's Ministry of ICT, Science, Technology and Innovation Kicks Off National AI Strategy

• Top 10 Presentation Tools Right Now

Kenya Proposes AI Law That Reaches Foreign Firms Like OpenAI and Meta

Kenya’s new draft Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technologies Policy is open for public consultation, and it is not the kind of light-touch, wait-and-see document most African governments have published on AI so far. It transcends Kenya’s borders, builds two new regulatory institutions from scratch, and tries to answer a question most AI policy on the continent still dodges: who actually pays for all this, and who gets protected from it? (Read More)

Kini Big Deal? (Why Does It Matter?)

If you build, sell, or deploy AI touching Kenyan users, the compliance clock just started. Foreign AI providers, OpenAI and Meta included, now face real registration, disclosure, and liability requirements instead of operating on guidance alone, while Kenyan startups get a genuine lever to compete: cheaper GPU access through the new compute programme rather than having to out-fund Big Tech.

One catch worth watching: the policy assumes local compute infrastructure that doesn’t fully exist yet. Kenya’s own $1 billion Microsoft-G42 data centre has sat stalled for over a year on funding talks, so “accessible compute” is still a promise more than a delivered reality.

World Wide Wahala

Five Startups Bet Billions That the Transformer’s Time Is Up

Every major LLM on the market today, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, all of them, runs on the same nine-year-old idea: the transformer, introduced in a 2017 Google paper with the now-famous title “Attention Is All You Need.” 

It has been, without exaggeration, one of the most consequential ideas in computer science. It is also, per a new MIT Technology Review deep dive, starting to buckle under its own success. A wave of well-funded startups now think they’ve found what comes next, and none of them agree on what that is (Read More).

KINI BIG DEAL?

Strip away the architecture jargon and this is fundamentally a story about cost, not cleverness. OpenAI spending $50 billion on compute this year is the number that explains why five separate startups think there’s room to out-engineer the biggest labs in the world on efficiency rather than raw scale. Nobody is trying to build a smarter ChatGPT here; they’re trying to build a cheaper one, or a faster one, or one that fits somewhere a transformer physically can’t.

That framing matters more in Lagos than in Palo Alto. Most of the continent isn’t going to out-compute anyone, and most African businesses, schools, and clinics don’t need to. What actually reaches them is the efficiency story: Liquid AI’s models running on a $50 Raspberry Pi, or a diffusion model doing GPT-4-level work at a tenth of the cost, is a far more useful data point for a Nigerian edtech startup or a rural clinic’s diagnostic tool than another headline about parameter counts. Cheaper, smaller, and offline-capable is the version of “the next big thing in LLMs” that actually ships on the continent, not the version that needs a $50 billion compute budget behind it.

The honest caveat, and it’s a real one: none of these five have actually dethroned the transformer yet. Subquadratic’s claims are disputed by researchers in the same MIT piece, Manifest AI is benchmarking against open models rather than frontier ones, and every mainstream tool anyone actually uses today — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini — is still built the old way. Zero agreement isn’t just a headline; it’s the accurate state of the field right now. Worth tracking, not worth betting the syllabus on yet. Na who go first prove say dem sabi pass transformer go carry the market.

🔗 Also in AI This Week 

• South Africa Wants to Use Machine Learning to Screen Travellers for Fraud

• Inside Anambra's "2.0" Plan: How Soludo's ICT Agency Wants AI, Not Just Wi-Fi, to Run Government

• SA's Deep-Tech Startup BIXIE Reports Early Traction Under FasterCapital's EquityPilot Programme

• Meta, Others Announce AI Academy to Strengthen AI Talent in Nigeria

• AMIE Demonstrates Real-Time Clinical Video Consultation Capabilities

• DeepMind Puts Sign Language AI Into Users' Hands

• Google Introduces Gemini 3.7 Flash

• Flock Tightens Its Rules in Response to Growing Surveillance Backlash

• Google Brings Spreadsheet Data to Life With Sheets Canvas

• Google Gets Fans Closer to the Game With Gemini and Pixel

• OpenAI Just Launched ChatGPT for Teens, But African Students Are Already Using It

• DeepSeek Ships V4-Pro to General Availability

• GLM-5.3 Scores 84.5% on CyberGym

• Lesotho's Ministry of ICT, Science, Technology and Innovation Kicks Off National AI Strategy

^{Author’s note: This is not a sponsored post, as it expresses my own opinions.}

About Me

I'm Awaye Rotimi A., your AI Educator and Consultant. I envision a world where cutting-edge technology not only drives efficiency but also scales productivity for individuals and organisations. My passion lies in democratising AI solutions and firmly believing in empowering and educating the African community. Contact me directly, and let’s discuss what AI can do for you and your organisation

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