Tech community blasts minister over ‘mediocre’ N100m Google AI fund

• Published On: 11 September 2024 at 18:01

The Minister of Communications, Innovation, and Digital Economy, Bosun Tijani, announced a N100 million AI Fund, which drew sharp criticism from the Nigerian tech community.

Critics argue that the fund, which is backed by Google, is insufficient to significantly influence AI development in Nigeria.

The criticism stems from a comparison to Google's individual startup support, which provides up to $350,000 in Google Cloud Credits via the Google for Startups Accelerator Africa program.

In contrast, the N100 million fund is intended to support multiple startups but only provides approximately $60,000 per startup on average.

In response to the Minister's announcement on X, CEO of edtech startup Educare, Alex Onyia @winexviv, questioned the initiative's scale and the level of support provided by Google for individual startups.

"N100m cannot even purchase an Nvidia chip for AI development. This is a mere $61k in today's naira, which is insufficient to cover the annual salary of a qualified AI engineer.

"Let us stop deceiving ourselves in this Nigeria. Unless it is simply using the GPT4 or Gemini APIs, which do not require PR to use. "Almost every mid-level software engineer in Nigeria already does that," he said.

Another member of the tech community, Jerry U @1Mr_Styler, responded to the Minister's announcement with the following:

"My startup received a $200k grant from Google, and all communications were via email. But here we are, launching a "AI fund" and throwing a party for $60,000.

"May I ask you, what kind of AI research can be done with $60k even if the whole fund was granted to a single startup?"

Gideon Ajose @theGideonAjose, while applauding the Minister's efforts, stated that the fund was insufficient to justify such a high-profile announcement.

"To be honest, I applaud your efforts, but they will not move the needle in Nigeria's AI needs.

"And it's hurtful because if you weren't in government and were practicing privately, you wouldn't have announced this. "This is not enough to get started; we are too far behind!" he exclaimed.

Another stakeholder, Citizen Olu, acknowledged the initiative's good intentions but stated that N100 million would be insufficient to significantly impact AI development in Nigeria.

"AI requires not only deep learning algorithms and large amounts of data to train, but also hardware systems powered by POWERFUL networked GPUs and other massive computational cores manufactured by companies such as NVIDIA and CEREBRAS. "The cost of these systems is exorbitant, even before considering the cost of data scientists, AI specialists, and so on," he said.

On Tuesday, the Ministry of Communications, in collaboration with Google, announced a N100 million AI Fund to support Nigerian startups that use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to develop innovative solutions.