GSMA and Pleias release LID model to close AI’s African language gap - Developing Telecoms

Ah, the Great African Language Gap—a chasm so vast that a mobile industry association and a plucky French startup had to step in with a 'language identification model' to even begin mapping it. CommonLingua can identify 334 languages, including a whopping 61 African ones. Because obviously the world's most linguistically diverse continent was just too niche for the usual suspects in Silicon Valley.

The model operates 'directly on UTF-8 byte sequences,' which is tech-speak for 'we couldn't be bothered to train on actual data.' One wonders how many of those 61 languages have enough training material to produce useful identification beyond a polite 'this is Swahili, maybe.' But hey, it's open-source, so the community can fill in the blanks—assuming the community has the compute, the expertise, and the free time.

GSMA and Pleias deserve a pat on the back for acknowledging that AI should maybe cover more than English, Mandarin, and Spanish. But this isn't a gap-closing; it's a gap-noticing. The real work—building meaningful applications in Hausa, Swahili, Yoruba—remains a distant dream. Still, at least now we can identify the languages we're not serving. Progress!