news

Making AI cheaper and less power hungry stands to put the world’s most in-demand technology within reach of millions more people — and to empower African startups to design products for African users.

Uh, I think the bottle neck is less design and more production? Unless by "product" they mean computer code...

[chief solutions architect for Huawei Cloud in sub-Saharan Africa, Harrison Li] clicked through a slide deck, presenting packages tailored to all levels of users and businesses: a free tier, pay-as-you-go hourly rates for DeepSeek models hosted on Huawei Cloud and more compute-intensive options for developers building chatbots and apps [emphasis mine]. For governments, he explained how private cloud systems could be physically installed in offices and ministries.

...they mean computer code. Note there isn't an example of what these governments can actually use the programme for.

To some critics, this carries ominous echoes of Belt and Road programs that helped some poor countries build critical infrastructure like ports, highways and airports, but left them heavily indebted and financially dependent on Chinese suppliers.

As opposed to before when their suppliers were...? If these countries had funded their infrastructure projects through the IMF, pretty sure they'd still be buying Chinese goods.

that's just nitpicking, here's the interesting bit:

For African startups like EqualyzAI, DeepSeek is “orders of magnitude” cheaper than competitors, Adekanmbi said. DeepSeek Chat, for instance, charges 27 cents to process one million tokens of query sent and $1.10 for every million tokens it generates in response. OpenAI’s GPT-4o charges $5 to process the same amount of tokens of query sent and $15 to produce the same amount of tokens in response. If EqualyzAI used GPT-4o, the startup would pay about $12,500 a month to train a small-language model for an e-learning platform, as opposed to the roughly $2,700 per month it now pays DeepSeek for the same task.

So even charging x15 times as much, OpenAI is still running at a loss. A big one. But... even considering that DeepSeek is a more lightweight/efficient programme and China overall is rapidly expanding their electricity output... it still seems hard to imagine any profit is actually happening. About the only actual benefit I see here is this:

EqualyzAI’s engineers used DeepSeek’s open-source architecture as scaffolding to start creating specialized small models as well as automated smart assistants. The vast majority of data in Africa hasn’t been digitized, so contractors across the continent are paid to gather agricultural, medical and financial records, as well as audio in Yoruba, Hausa and Nigerian-accented English. EqualyzAI then trained individual models on the relevant datasets, and tweaked the open weights — the code that instructs an AI model to emphasize or ignore certain information — for each customer. The resulting chatbots and apps are now being used by fintech companies, e-learning platforms and health-care startups. Like all companies that build on DeepSeek, they can choose to either host their products locally and pay for computing and storage infrastructure, or go through providers like Huawei. EqualyzAI does the former.

It keeps the big US firms from building up models in other languages, keeps the servers (relatively) local and in the hands of people who at least actually live alongside the populations who are going to be impacted by it.