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SIMON BROWN: I’m chatting with Wesley Diphoko. He is Technology Analyst and Editor-In-Chief at Fast Company South Africa. Wesley, appreciate the time. Now, 2025 has very much been a year of AI. We got our first public LLM [large language model] three years ago. We have had the Mag Seven doing great. We have just had the recent release of the new Gemini model Nano Banana, which keeps on blowing my brain in terms of its ability.
My question refers to a recent column where you talk around the G20 and the theme on inequality. You mentioned that the countries developing AI are going to get the returns – but not those who just consume it. It’s a broad question to start, but where is Africa in this AI journey, because my sense is very much that we are at best a consumer?
WESLEY DIPHOKO: Yes, that’s correct. I think that was, I would say, a sense I got from the meetings I’ve attended, but it is also my personal view that I don’t think we are developers yet. I think we are consumers. And what that means is that we use technology that’s been developed. That is the area that it has been to. We use it for whatever else that we want, whether it be health, education or whatever. I think that’s where we are at this stage.
I make the point that I think there are attempts to at least be a player in this space, citing examples like the Cassava Technologies and the Nvidia collaboration of creating an AI factory, if you want, on the continent – which I think is a step in the right direction. However, that I think is not sufficient. Yes, there’s more that needs to be done.
SIMON BROWN: That’s a good point. We’re using it and in many cases we add sort of layers on top so that we don’t just take the LLM; we modify it for ourselves. We’re not seeing much in the sense of coding and the like.
There was another one that you suggested – and it’s from a scholar across the continent who’s talking around the concept of bringing minerals into it. Talk me around that idea that you were discussing.
WESLEY DIPHOKO: Yes, I find that interesting. We follow these discussions as people who document the innovation stories. I found that one to be extremely interesting in the sense that, in the background to that, the continent’s minerals have been to an extent exploited without the continent benefitting from them. And you can take that to our past as a continent.
But there is a realisation now that we need to get something out. Because AI chips use these minerals, if you want, in the process of producing them, the thinking is that because they are in demand the option [is] to not sell them but, essentially for lack of a technical word for this, to almost enable whoever needs them to subscribe to them, to almost use what is called in the tech space, the Saas [software as a service] model, which is almost like a service that you use without necessarily buying; and you all must subscribe to it.
I find that interesting because it almost allows the continent to still keep its minerals while getting benefit out of them. I don’t know whether it necessarily works at the negotiation levels – the nations that require these. But I find that to be an interesting sort of suggestion which I think is worthy of attention because, like it, Simon, I think the key thing here is that we don’t have the skills that are equivalent to the skills that created your ChatGPT of the world.
While we’re still catching up we need to leverage what we have in order to at least be players, because I think it’s important that the continent as a region becomes a player for … sake, and for many, many other reasons.
SIMON BROWN: I like the idea of that sort of minerals into the chips – almost, as you say, a software as a service. And I think what it gets at, and I take your point, how that works we’ll find in time in the discussions. We don’t know; it’s early days. But just as a concept of the innovation coming with a completely different thing, rather than saying let’s train coders, which is often the response, to be clear, let’s train coders anyway.
Let’s also think about some other, I almost want to say, crazy ideas and see where they go.
WESLEY DIPHOKO: Exactly. And I think we don’t think deeply about the value of our assets, if I may put it that way. If you think about some mobile devices that use some …., who has ever thought that you could use our assets to – at least in terms of the business model – still benefit us greatly?
That’s why, for me, I think this is just one of those approaches that needs to be paid attention to. There are other things as well that I think need to be discussed at a higher level and mainly for sovereignty’s sake.
And one of the points which I don’t necessarily mention in the column is that, yes, we’ve spoken about the data being hosted locally, but that’s not enough because you still use technologies that are developed elsewhere. And if that is cut off, you are out.
And so what I’m getting to is that you’re consistently being kind of dependent as a user of these tools. I think the content needs to get to a point where there are rules of engagement that are applied as far as technologies that could be locally based completely, because that allows you to be independent and to maintain your sovereignty because AI will actually become a cathartic.
SIMON BROWN: I like that thinking. And I suspect one of the steps is perhaps we need to speak as a continent, rather than as 50-plus individual states. I’m reminded of India, when they said to Apple, hang on a second, we want you to make some of those iPhones in our country. And everyone was [thinking] it’s never going to happen. Except now it does happen. I mean, there are iPhones being made in India.
My iPhone – I don’t know where it was made – could be a Foxconn in Taiwan, it could be in India. That was sort of using their clout at 1.4 billion people, which is, again, what the African continent is.
WESLEY DIPHOKO: Yes, exactly. And maybe to just take a step back again, the thinking behind what I wrote about was also inspired by this one item at the G20, which is inequality if you take into account the fact that AI and mainly tech has created that inequality to an extent.
I think we were getting to a point where, [while] we were always levelling the playing field in other ways, we were catching up in a way. But now we’re at a point where the gap is being widened again. And I think you cannot allow a society to go back to where we were.
So I think everything has to be done to make sure that society is taken care of as far as this issue of inequality is concerned. Those are just some of the thoughts that I think are quite important to consider in this debate.
And, if I may just add, what frustrates me is that we talk about the AI and we talk about the Saas level of training interventions as if they are us getting into AI. And yet you’re just tinkering on top of something that’s been made for you. You never want to find yourself in that situation. You want to be determining your [own] future. You want to create that future yourself and you have to get to the fundamental technology. That’s what we need to focus on before it’s too late.
SIMON BROWN: Yes. I love your point around how that gap is widening. I’m thinking of Zipline, which in Rwanda delivers medical by drone. The rest of the world is talking about doing burritos, but they haven’t even got that. We are already doing that in Africa and I think we’ve been doing it for close on a decade.
We’ll leave it there. Wesley Diphoko, technology analyst and editor-in-chief at Fast Company, I appreciate the time.
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