Researcher and Lanfrica founder Chris Emezue joins the season finale of the podcast to discuss the potential for AI to improve translation across low-resource languages — especially in Africa.
Brian and Sarah talk about what’s next for the podcast, as well as where AI has been showing up in earnings reports for GAMMA companies over the past week. Listen for more on those stories and a content-themed edition of "Two truths and l’AI" in this week’s episode.
Timestamps for this episode:
[0:00] Intro
[0:16] Welcome
[0:35] What’s next for the podcast
[4:42] Tech earnings reports
[7:48] Amazon’s new AI shopping assistant Rufus
[13:02] Google adds text-to-image functionality to Bard
[16:58] Meta’s increased spending on AI
[19:58] "Two truths and l’AI"
[28:15] Chris Emezue interview
[30:27] How he began working with the Bambara language
[33:49] His experience in Nigeria and working with other African languages
[40:00] Meeting collaborators through Masakhane
[44:58] Founding Lanfrica
[50:40] What a focus on data farming means
[52:57] What constitutes good data when working with languages?
[1:04:46] How other people can get involved with AI and language projects
Links for topics referenced in this episode:
Lanfrica: https://lanfrica.com/
Data farming vs. data mining (Lanfrica): https://lanfrica.com/blog/data-farming-in-the-global-south/
Lanfrica Talks: https://lanfrica.com/blog/lanfrica-talks/
Masakhane website:
https://www.masakhane.io/
Microsoft and Alphabet’s recent earnings (The Byte): https://futurism.com/the-byte/ai-companies-lose-190-billion-dismal-google-report
Amazon’s new AI shopping assistant (TechCrunch): https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/01/amazon-debuts-rufus-an-ai-shopping-assistant-in-its-mobile-app/
Google adds functionality to Bard (The Verge): https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/1/24057438/bard-gemini-imagen-google-ai-image-generation
Zuckerberg’s plan to beat Google and Microsoft in AI (Fortune): https://finance.yahoo.com/news/mark-zuckerberg-explained-meta-crush-004732591.html
The AI Artifacts Podcast’s visual branding is by Skaaren Design.
Music used in this podcast comes from "Vanishing Horizon" by Jason Shaw and is licensed under an Attribution 3.0 United States License.
Episode 14: Chris Emezue of Lanfrica on AI for low-resource languages