Africa's AI moment has arrived — this 1.5B model built from scratch for 12 African languages beats Google, Meta, and Alibaba while being 8x smaller

(Image credit: Vambo AI)

MORENA beat 26 tested models despite having only 1.5 billion parameters

The model from Vambo AI was built specifically around African languages from scratch

MORENA uses fewer tokens to represent African text than major rivals

Vambo AI has released MORENA, a 1.5B parameter language model covering 12 languages spoken across Africa, plus English, French and code.

The developers say it beats models from Google, Meta, Alibaba and HuggingFace on African language modelling and translation while being…