"Africa has no shortage of AI talent, groundbreaking research or innovative ideas. So why do so many promising AI innovations never make it into the hands of the people who need them?" Dog-fooding but for African tech with Vukosi Marivate | On What Terms? youtube.com/watch?v=zMXW...

OpenAI vs. Anthropic: Inside the Biggest Rivalry in Tech: A new world has arrived. Dario Amodei and Sam Altman cannot stop fighting over it. - The Atlantic

Out Now: Our new @WEF Global Future Council on Data Frontiers briefing paper, Data Sovereignty in Practice! 🌍 True sovereignty goes beyond data localization to full-stack control. 📄 Read here: reports.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Dat... Learn about our council initiatives.weforum.org/global-futur...

There is No Theoretical Curse of Multilinguality For Embedding Space Structure arxiv.org/abs/2608.17088

Exclusive: Paying for frontier AI models buys 4-month head start at 5x the cost arstechnica.com/ai/2026/09/e...

Exclusive: Paying for frontier AI models buys 4-month head start at 5x the cost

Ars previewed Mozilla’s report on how cheap open models caught up on capability.

arstechnica.com

Worth a read to ground yourself during this time of Fear Uncertainty and Doubt around Artificial Intelligence <> Misleading Metaphors and Real Risks: What To Fear from AI Agents and How to Reclaim Our Human Agency Melanie Mitchell - aiguide.substack.com/p/misleading...

Misleading Metaphors, Real Risks

What To Fear from AI Agents and How to Reclaim Our Human Agency

aiguide.substack.com

Thinking in Public - No, AI will not kill us all. But handing companies control without accountability might. reflectingwide.blogspot.com/2026/09/no-a...

A rallying cry <> Don’t Let Anyone Take Away Your Big Box of Cables blog.jim-nielsen.com/2026/hands-o...

Don’t Let Anyone Take Away Your Big Box of Cables

Writing about the big beautiful mess that is making things for the world wide web.

blog.jim-nielsen.com

My sabbatical continues. This week speaking and learning at the AI in Context workshop in Germany at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. Will be presenting on Evaluation as Epistemic Justice in African NLP.

Watch our NEDLAC panel discussing AI, decent work, and inclusive growth with Anisa Khan, Thandile Zonke, Prof. Michael Sachs & Nozipho Tshabalala. Africa must move from being passive consumers of foreign AI to active R&D Watch the panel & Q&A here: youtu.be/654-8cmUTNs

NEDLAC Summit 2026: AI Panel - Advancing Inclusive Growth and Decent Work in the Age of AI

YouTube video by Data Science for Social Impact (DSFSI)

youtu.be

Turn down the volume! How AI music platforms carry out epistemic injustice and silence African traditions -

Turn down the volume! How AI music platforms carry out epistemic injustice and silence African traditions

The music industry has increasingly been transformed by artificial intelligence (AI), assisting artists in composing music, mixing and mastering, lyric writing, and voice generation. Debates about how...

link.springer.com

Learn about our #TextAugment tool <> The African-built tool helping the world’s under-resourced languages enter the AI age - birdstoryagency.com/ai-5/

The Killing of the Gaza Chef pca.st/episode/a80c...

What will be left for us to work on? www.normaltech.ai/p/what-will-...

Why AI hasn’t replaced software engineers, and won’t www.normaltech.ai/p/why-ai-has...

What happened when a South African school switched from English to bilingual science tests - theconversation.com/what-happene...

What happened when a South African school switched from English to bilingual science tests

In a case study, parents responded positively to their children being taught science in two languages.

theconversation.com

Flying was once a rare, bounded period of time untethered from the world below—but good plane Wi-Fi is taking that luxury away, @nancywalecki.bsky.social writes.

Airplane Wi-Fi Is Great Now!

Oh no.

bit.ly

We are seeing similar challenges in universities. Our evaluation approach must change -> Does AI stop children from learning?: New data show the peril and promise of the technology The economist <> www.economist.com/graphic-deta... Internet Archive: archive.ph/qAPft

The Deep Learning Indaba is, and always will be, its people 🌍💡 @deeplearningindaba.bsky.social Reflecting on #DLI2026 at Pan-Atlantic University in Lagos, Nigeria, I wrote about what makes this community unique and why its travelling nature matters. Read the post 👇 www.vima.co.za/2026/08/18/t... 1/

The Deep Learning Indaba is, and always will be, its people [post Deep Learning Indaba 2026]

During the Mutapa Empire, which encompassed parts of what are now Zimbabwe and Mozambique, the royal court, the dzimbahwe, moved from place to place rather than remaining in a single location. As i…

vima.co.za

We Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility www.404media.co/we-tracked-a...

We Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility

We placed a tracking device in a shipment of rare books to see which AI company was buying it, and found an Amazon facility where Amazon scans and destroys books.

404media.co

Telling our stories: Inside story — how Eskom was turned around, told by those who steered it <>

Inside story — how Eskom was turned around, told by those who steered it

The three men who righted the nation’s power utility were all on stage at a Unisa event and told the tale of an unlikely turnaround in their own words.…

dailymaverick.co.za

Rirhandzu Marivate: Working with food as if people and planet matter <> www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2026...

Rirhandzu Marivate: Working with food as if people and planet matter

Rirhandzu Marivate is transforming how people relate to nature via food and farming, using regenerative farming practices and agroecology to reshape urban food systems and empower marginalised…

dailymaverick.co.za

Urghh this timeline. Stop the train, I want to get off<> Now That 2027 RAM Manufacturing Capacity Has Reportedly Been Sold Through, It's Hard To Imagine the RAMageddon Ending Any Time Soon

Now That 2027 RAM Manufacturing Capacity Has Reportedly Been Sold Through, It's Hard To Imagine the RAMageddon Ending Any Time Soon

A new report suggests that all three memory manufacturers — Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron — have collectively sold through their 2027 memory manufacturing capacity to AI companies.

ign.com

Still understudied "Knowledge work’s one saving grace, until recently, was that it was still executed by humans.............Now, AI agents are increasingly executing much of that work for Knowledge Workers." Why Is Everyone In Tech So Sad? | NOEMA www.noemamag.com/why-is-every...

Quantified World, and a great home project <> A Physicist Rigged His Pet Hamster’s Wheel to Upload to Strava. It Runs Surprisingly Far Every Night www.runnersworld.com/news/a733551...

#AI4Good Flashback <> AI is moving fast | Yoshua Bengio, Vukosi Marivate, Joëlle Barral & Yutaka Matsuo

AI is moving fast | Yoshua Bengio, Vukosi Marivate, Joëlle Barral & Yutaka Matsuo

Four of the world’s foremost AI scientists. One moderator from the generation that will inherit their decisions. Yoshua Bengio, Vukosi Marivate, Joëlle Barral and Yutaka Matsuo, members of the UN…

youtube.com

Coverage of the work of DSFSI Lab member, and AfriDSAI emerging fellow Dr Seani Rananga <> PhD study develops AI to spot fake news in SA languages

PhD study develops AI to spot fake news in SA languages

Multilingual AI study aims to expand language coverage and address deepfakes, hate speech and online harm

timeslive.co.za

1/🇳🇬 The countdown is on for #DLI2026 in Lagos, Nigeria! The @dsfsi_up lab is heading to the Deep Learning Indaba (2–7 August 2026). Here is a thread of where you can find our team, research, and workshops throughout the week! 👇 www.dsfsi.co.za/blog/dsfsi-a...

How online betting is destroying young people's lives in South Africa | DW Reporter www.youtube.com/watch?v=-13y...

How online betting is destroying young people's lives in South Africa | DW Reporter

Sisanda Lwana lost over 7000 Euros betting online - and overcame her addiction. Her story brings to light the dark side of the gambling industry. Artikeltext The dream of getting rich…

youtube.com

Worth a read <> Analysis: Navigating the Constitutional Anatomy of Copyright in the Age of AI A Technical Breakdown by AfriDSAI Senior Fellow Prof. Chijioke Okorie on South Africa's Copyright Amendment Bill