How a Community Effort is Teaching AI to See Africa’s Richness
Blog post from Cohere
AfriAya, presented at Masakhane and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, is part of Cohere Labs' initiative to enhance linguistic and cultural inclusion in AI through open science. Currently advancing to version 2, AfriAya aims to expand its reach to 25 African languages and adapt Aya Vision for local use cases. This project is part of a broader effort to support low-resource languages across the globe, involving over 100 languages and contributors from regions with limited AI infrastructure. Key initiatives include multilingual benchmarks such as INCLUDE, NeoBabel, Global MMLU, Kaleidoscope, and M-RewardBench, all aiming to evaluate and improve AI's performance in diverse linguistic and cultural contexts. The project emphasizes the importance of starting research before it's fully developed, advocating for community involvement and personal motivation as essential components for innovation. AfriAya exemplifies how curiosity and collaboration can drive significant advancements in AI, inviting new researchers to join their open science community to explore and redefine AI's understanding of human cultures.