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Africa Is Building an A.I. Industry That Doesn’t Look Like Silicon Valley
- holstvoogd 7y agoHigh time, tech needs some desperately needs to diversify from the silicon valley culture.
- hackermang 7y ago[citation needed]
- adrianN 7y agoOfftopic: This article contains four pictures that contribute nothing to the content and weigh around 10MB. The first one takes up a whole screen of space. Why do people do this?
- redact207 7y agoIt's probably to do with google's algo that favours a certain content-to-image ratio. Medium gives the author access to easily embeddable images that often have nothing to do with the article just so the article's not just one giant block of text. I would have loved to have seem some photos of this industry out of Africa though.
- adrianN 7y agoOk good, but why do these pictures have to be 2-3MB each? Each one of them would have taken an hour to download just a few years ago (or today, if you live in a less well developed area of the world).
- obituary_latte 7y agoI wonder if there is a way browsers could preemptively “compress“ (I doubt that’s the correct terminology) prior to downloading? Like somehow grab every nth bit, combine, render and then allow for further requests to refine at user discretion. Wonder if anyone has ever tried something like that.
- markdown 7y agoThis used to be a feature of Opera. If you enabled it, it would run all webpages through the Opera proxy, which would downsize everything for you.
- slavik81 7y agoThe wavelet-based image formats like JPEG 2000 were designed to make that sort of thing possible. They never really caught on, though.
- shakna 7y agoI don't think that's even possible with the byte-ordering of a lot of the formats we use today. Like the pass extraction of PNG [0] would make it somewhat possible, but you'd need to be dropping packets which you might as well receive. I don't think you'd be able to break after the first pass. JPEG is probably worse. However, the super-modern formats that are still gaining popularity, like WebP absolutely do support this. At the core of WebP is block prediction, so a low-bandwidth application might actually assume the values of certain blocks so it doesn't need to fetch them. [0] https://www.w3.org/TR/2003/REC-PNG-20031110/#4Concepts.EncodingPassAbs https://www.w3.org/TR/2003/REC-PNG-20031110/#4Concepts.Encod...
- bootloop 7y agoI know that Opera had this feature once and Google Chrome on Android does this via it's "Lite mode": https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/2392284?co=GENIE.Platform%3DAndroid&hl=en https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/2392284?co=GENIE.Pl...
- swebs 7y agoThis feature is built into Jpeg images, though most image editors don't save them with this enabled by default. People call them progressive jpegs. https://www.thewebmaster.com/dev/2016/feb/10/how-progressive-jpegs-can-speed-up-your-website/ https://www.thewebmaster.com/dev/2016/feb/10/how-progressive...
- buboard 7y agoYeah People have to justify the cost of a their retina screens
- wil421 7y agoI was downloading MP3s to my MP3 player with a 16MB san over ISDN circa 2000. For most people in the US it hasn’t taken hours to download an MP3 for over a decade maybe 2.
- adrianN 7y agoCa 2000 will always be just a few years ago to me. Besides, there are areas in Germany today where you can't get >1Mbit connections.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- jessriedel 7y agoBesides the SEO redact207 mentioned, readers are often driven away by a block of text.
- ghaff 7y agoAnd in all fairness, this isn't just a web thing. Most newspapers have historically used all manner of graphical techniques in addition to images to break up text blocks such as subheads, callouts, graphics, lines, etc. (Although, also to be fair, historically newspapers also tended to try to include images that were directly relevant to the story rather than picking random stock imagery.)
- Yetanfou 7y agoI'd rephrase that into skimmers are often driven away by a block of text while readers are driven away by page-filling images. There is an optimum between these two which attracts people from both sides of the divide - a few targeted images can enhance a text and make it look less imposing to skimmers.
- puranjay 7y agoLarge blocks of text are intimidating That said, running these images through any basic image compression utility will probably cut down the size by 50-70%
- investologia 7y agoThe fact 4 pictures weight 10MB ;retty much tells a lot about the webmaster. In some sites/blogs it's good to put many pictures. It really depends on your readers. In HN people look more for content based articles and they don't care if an article is mostly text without pictures
- cscurmudgeon 7y agoSEO. Despite all the AI buzz, Google's search is pretty hackable with tricks like this.
- egypturnash 7y agoHave you ever read a “magazine”? These were pre-internet things that were printed on paper, and included text and images. Often these images were illustrations, rather than photographs. They break up the text walls, attract the eye when you’re flipping through deciding which piece to read, and create a mood. As to why the images are so huge, well, nobody gives two shits about download size any more in a world where you’re also probably pulling down multiple megabytes of ad images and JavaScript because every damn webpage has to be an app even if it’s purely static content nowadays.
- slig 7y agoBecause even with 100+ million of VC money [1], Medium couldn't be bothered to pay for a CDN that automatically optimizes images and/or optimize the image on their own after the user uploads it. [1]: https://www.crunchbase.com/search/funding_rounds/field/organizations/funding_total/medium https://www.crunchbase.com/search/funding_rounds/field/organ...
- Avalaxy 7y agoLet's hope silicon valley doesn't get their hands on them. We need more people fixing real problems for the third world instead of solving uninteresting first world problems.
- taliesinb 7y agoGreat to see interest in the Indaba from the HN community! This year was a lot of fun; we had some amazing students, speakers, and tutors. While the practical notebooks we used in 2018 were already amazing, my colleagues and I worked hard on expanding and improving them for the 2019 Indaba. In case anyone wants to check them out, here's a full list of the practicals (the links go to Google Colab notebooks) 1a: Machine Learning Fundamentals, http://bit.ly/2nfeu4W http://bit.ly/2nfeu4W 1b: Build your own TensorFlow, http://bit.ly/2obD1rK http://bit.ly/2obD1rK 2a: Deep Feedforward Networks, http://bit.ly/2oQSjSQ http://bit.ly/2oQSjSQ 2b: Optimization for Deep Learning, http://bit.ly/2nqkyHB http://bit.ly/2nqkyHB 3a: Convolutional Networks, http://bit.ly/2nqdQRX http://bit.ly/2nqdQRX 3b: Deep Generative Models, http://bit.ly/2nnkisU http://bit.ly/2nnkisU 4a: Recurrent Neural Networks, http://bit.ly/2ncgYkx http://bit.ly/2ncgYkx 4b: Reinforcement Learning, http://bit.ly/2oO4lMK http://bit.ly/2oO4lMK They're also available on the official github page: https://github.com/deep-learning-indaba https://github.com/deep-learning-indaba We'd love any feedback on the practicals to improve them for next year! If you have some ML expertise and would like to volunteer to be a tutor at next year's Indaba, which will be held in Tunisia in late August 2020, drop me a mail at contact (at) taliesin.ai. I also encourage anyone to apply to attend as a student!
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- wodenokoto 7y agoAre there videos like from pycon? The conference sounds really interesting
- taliesinb 7y agoYes! The videos were just updated, here is the playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLICxY_yQeGYng7mbMmuZjt3S1sDb6YpBJ https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLICxY_yQeGYng7mbMmuZj...
- light_hue_1 7y agoThat's great! I don't understand the rather negative introduction in the article. Indaba seems to be about getting people up to speed with the basics of ML, NeurIPS and other ML conferences are about cutting-edge research. Both have an importance place. Why the distinction about Western vs non-Western AI? This isn't an alternative, it's a way to bootstrap research in Africa. And that's amazing. But the narrative that there's tension between the two and that somehow African AI is "other" and won't find a place in "Western AI" when the research is world-class is totally absurd and does African researchers a massive disservice. Yes, Africa is under-represented at international AI conferences. But that's a consequence of many things (imperialism, oppression, economics, etc.), not the somewhat-impartial double-blind review system we have. I wish people would tell a more inclusive and positive story rather than manufacture some conflict where there is none.
- rashthedude 7y agoThere should be a ban on medium articles being published on hacker news.
- unixhero 7y agoI'd like to know why. Has it got something to do with yet another corporate entity consolidating market position and power?
- sgt 7y agoMedium is encouraging people to put their articles behind a paywall, so many Medium stories are inaccessible unless you log in. Many feel this goes against the spirit of blogging.
- gtirloni 7y agoYes but the romantic era of blogging is over. Content creators have to get paid. I'd rather have paywalls than widespread ads. At least it's the normal arrangement that way: you create something valuable, I pay for it. Very clear cut. With ads that relationship is blurry.
- simion314 7y ago>Yes but the romantic era of blogging is over. Content creators have to get paid. IMO most bloggers are not living by writing blogs, the blogs post are used usually for promotion or other reasons and not to make a few cents. Newspapers are a different thing.
- gtirloni 7y agoSure, but we're talking about bloggers than want to profit. Otherwise, they wouldn't have paywalls, right? In that case, if their content is just self-promotion and doesn't have a lot of value, fewer people will pay. EDIT: Really puzzled by the downvotes, care to elaborate?
- username90 7y agoWhat makes it different from silicon valley? I read the whole article but couldn't find it mentioned except for the headline. Is there something I'm missing? Is it just that they aim to limit sponsorship from silicon valley giants?
- scumbert 7y agoThey take money from the CCP instead of venture capitalists
- silasdavis 7y agoDo you have a source for this claim?
- cardy31 7y agoNot adding a source, but Chinese investment on the African continent is huge right now, and has been for years. It has gone largely unnoticed by western media. However, many African nations now owe huge amounts of money to China from large infrastructure projects. Anecdotally, when I was in Zambia every construction company was Chinese, and every job site was a Chinese foreman with Zambians doing the work.
- aaron695 7y ago> It has gone largely unnoticed by western media. I wouldn't say this is really true. But either way I haven't heard of them investing in intellectual capital anywhere, just infrastructure. Which is amazingly great, they are rapidly improving quality of life in so many countries the west has in many ways abandoned.
- thablackbull 7y agoSo what we've learned from this thread is: * Chinese firms are hiring plenty of locals and not importing labor as commonly accused of from your own personal experience * Chinese investments are investing plenty, even in AI, and not just extracting commodities * By investing, Africans are building real skills and developing their own AI talent pool Really makes you wonder why we here in America just ignore Africa.
- ineedasername 7y agoIt's good to get away from the Silicon Valley mold. Sure it has produced many great successes, but it's only one method of going about things, with various trade-offs and failure modes. There's no reason for the model of seed-> angel-> venture-> IPO has to be repeated everywhere, a robust ecosystem of technological advancement should have more diversity than that.
- MoroCode 7y agoHow fantastic is this. I am Egyptian working in North America. This sounds like something I would love to attend
- mark_l_watson 7y agoGood stuff! As part of a tour in Kenya my wife and I spent a day in a village and in addition to people’s kind generosity inviting us into their homes, the other strong impression from that day was how very happy the kids were to be in school. I took a remote class on globalization from Wharton Business School several years ago and one of the messages was that Africa would become an economic superpower. While much of the world has benefited from globalization, I like to see each country and region strongly maintain their own culture and national identity. I would find a world that was more or less the same to be a sad thing. Viva Indaba!
- nof1 7y agoI wouldn't be surprised if Africa eventually surpassed the West in AI. Often it's easier for countries and companies with less existing technological infrastructure (or baggage from the previous dominant paradigm) to ramp up on something new.
- lilfrost 7y agoDo you have an example?
- fnbr 7y agoTwo examples: - Kenya has a dominant electronic currency, M-Pesa - South Korea rapidly developed into a globally competitive developed country, despite being poor in the middle of the 20th century (same applies to Japan, just slightly less so).
- inimino 7y agoThis is sometimes called "leapfrogging" and one example was cell phone technology (when countries that came later to the game adopted newer and better standards). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leapfrogging https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leapfrogging
- SachaMichel 7y agoSurely he must mean implementation in the overall infrastructure. From my time in America is seems that overhauling systems is not popular policy at all. Unfortunately as an African myself there are larger issues than AI that need to be solved before that can even be in the periphery of something near that statement.
- jorblumesea 7y agoKnowledge workers aren't the same as physical infrastructure. Where you see the developing world surpass the West are things such as payment systems, cell networks, trains etc. Physical things that the West has invested in previous, where the developing world isn't hampered by the momentum of existing systems. I would be very surprised. ML is basically advanced applied mathematics and requires a high level of technical literacy. Africa in general lags the world in most fields of STEM. There are plenty of examples where some developing country has better cell networks than the US but fails to come close to Western cutting edge research.
- dwoozle 7y agoStatistical machine learning is one of the fields where diversity really does matter. A CPU from Silicon Valley works just as well in Africa. But models trained in the West and with hyperparameters tweaked by western people will contain all kinds of biases that make it dangerous even in the west and downright lunatic in a very different culture.
- timbaboon 7y agoI can't imagine a self-driving car managing to drive on South African (or many other African) roads. It seems like these cars are trained to drive in countries with different types of driver (and pedestrian) behaviour, and probably wouldn't generalise well to places with little regard for rules of the road. Mini-bus taxis here pretty much do whatever they want and are far from rational in their decision making...
- steev 7y agoThis is great for researchers in Africa and the surrounding area, but it seems a simpler solution would be for the CS community to move towards placing greater weight on journals, rather than conferences (like just about all other disciplines). It's not just researchers in the poorer countries of Africa that struggle. Even graduate students in the US can be put in difficult situations where a paper is accepted but they have no travel support from their advisor, department, or institution. As an anecdote, I recently had to put up $1,500 of my own money to travel to a conference in Italy because my advisor doesn't have any funding and my department only paid for registration. Luckily my wife works and it wasn't an issue paying for the trip, but it was still a frustrating experience.
- Vinnl 7y agoIf it was easy to get academics to disseminate their work in a different way, we'd have far fewer problems in academia...
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- bo1024 7y agoThe recent surge of ML research in various parts of Africa is awesome. But from what I've seen (including this article), it is not much of an A.I. industry yet -- most activity is in research with an academic focus. (So, no wonder it looks different from Silicon valley.) Hopefully this helps solve the chicken-and-egg problem needed to get industry going.
- proc0 7y agoYeah and they will use all the deep learning research, probably open source tools like TensorFlow, and then deploy to AWS? I think what's happening is that SV is democratizing IT tools for some years now and has been expanding globally. Bit weird to frame it as a competitor when most likely it's probably a child of silicon valley, and cannot really compete unless they come up with a COMPLETELY NEW infrastructure and AI technology from the ground up, which is possible but obviously not the case.