True, good job to that team. But the way Meta does “open source” is specifically designed to concentrate power - money and control - at Meta. Broadly big tech at a few locations. And sorry - but that just not work for the rest of us. If that is the prize of “progress” we ok 👍🏾

If you're attending the AI Action Summit in Paris, check out Lesan AI's demo at the African AI Village on Tuesday. Asmelash Teka is also a Distributed AI Research Institute is on Mastodon fellow. Talk to him about how OpenAI + friends have been going around threatening small businesses. restofworld.org/2023/3-minutes…

Try our Khaya Chat demo on Hugging Face 👏🏽 (link in comments) Powered by the Ghana Natural Language Processing (NLP) Algorine Research Khaya AI API and DeepSeek foundational models Amharic & Tigrinya powered by our partner lesan 🇬🇭🇬🇭 cc WSA United Nations John Dramani Mahama Sam 'Dzata' George 🦁🇬🇭 Pablo ✌️ Hon. Ohene Kwame Frimpong, MP

At RightsCon, Irob Anina joined a powerful panel discussion on how hate speech fuels violence against civilians. Speakers, including @timnitGebru (@dair-community.social/bsky.social) (DAIR), Gebrekirstos (Tghat), and Asmelash (Lesan AI), examined the impact of the longest consecutive internet blackout in history—730

In Scientific American, Asmelash Teka & I ask: "In the age of unbridled AI hype, with the likes of Elon Musk claiming to build a “maximally truth-seeking AI,” how did we come to have less reliable speech recognition systems than we did before?" 🧵 scientificamerican.com/article/replac…

ALL social media is 4chan in these languages & contexts. We spent 3 years documenting failures. We had no language tech for this, not even spell checkers. So we partnered with lesan founded by Asmelash Teka to create those tools. restofworld.org/2023/3-minutes…

Wow, an ICES conference where they can't spell "ኢትዮጵያ" correctly. The harm of bad keyboards and missing spelling checkers. From: ices22.hu.edu.et/web/content/81…

አርቴፊሻል ኢንተለጀንስ እና አፍሪካ፦ አንድ ለአንድ ከአስመላሽ ተካ ጋር p.dw.com/p/4vD0d?maca=a…

Most people, including myself, enjoy using technology like ChatGPT, DeepSeek, Qwen, Claude, Perplexity and so on. But a few really invest their time, money, effort and knowledge. Asmelash Teka has been doing that for years. linkedin.com/pulse/lesanai-… via LinkedIn

🌐💻 Our latest #WhoseVoices podcast episode explores how to make the internet more accessible, especially for non-English speakers and people with impairments. Tune in! podcast.whoseknowledge.org/posts/ep32/

Asmelash Teka, co-founder of lesan, shares his community-centered approach to building machine translation systems for low-resource languages like Amharic and Tigrinya. He envisions a decentralized, community-driven future for African AI.

🎙️ What happens when disabled voices lead the tech conversation? At #RightsCon25, our co-founder Rahul Bajaj joined khansa Maria & Asmelash Teka to explore community-first approaches to accessible language tech. @[email protected] on Mastodon 🎧 Listen: podcast.whoseknowledge.org/posts/ep32/

The GFF Amharic Keyman Keyboard v3.3 is ready for download (desktop & mobile), keyman.com/keyboards/gff_… The desktop keyboard now provides the wonderful Agbalumo and Menbere fonts. The full listing of bundled fonts appears below:

🌿This Ashenda, we’re bringing something special to Tigrays’ young girls; “Nata Skate”, we would love to raise €1000 to train & start a culture of joy, skating & healing! Make it happen! 🌿Donate here easeing.org Or Local - Hibret bank: 2490114219351013