In May 2023 Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI in San Francisco, California, embarked on a 17-city world tour to promote artificial intelligence (AI) tools. One of the stops in the first week of the tour was Lagos, Nigeria. Yet, research assessing the performance of OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT on a data set of 670 languages shows that African languages have the least support1. The large language model GPT-4, which underlies ChatGPT, recognizes sentences written in Hausa, Nigeria’s most widely spoken language, only 10–20% of the time.
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