N-ATLAS - Nigeria's First Government-Supported Multilingual LLM

Nigeria is building its first government-backed Large Language Model in partnership with Awarri, a local AI startup, along with nonprofit Data.org and government bodies. The LLM will be trained in five low-resource languages and accented English to increase representation of Nigerian languages in AI systems. The initiative aims to position African-built AI as globally competitive while addressing the gap between AI development concentrated in corporations and the communities whose data trains these systems.