The announcement of a N100 million AI Fund by the Minister of Communications, Innovation, and Digital Economy, Bosun Tijani has drawn sharp criticism from the Nigerian tech community.
Critics argue that the fund, backed by Google, is too modest to significantly impact AI development in Nigeria.
The criticism stems from the comparison with Google’s individual startup support, which offers up to $350,000 in Google Cloud Credits through the Google for Startups Accelerator Africa program.
In contrast, the N100 million fund is intended to support multiple startups but amounts to only about $60,000 per startup on average.
Reacting to the Minister’s announcement on X, CEO of the edtech startup Educare, Alex Onyia @winexviv
criticized the scale of the initiative, questioning its adequacy given the level of support available to individual startups from Google.
“N100m cannot even buy Nvidia chip used for Ai development. This is mere $61k in today’s naira which is not up to the annual salary of a proper Ai engineer.
“Let’s stop deceiving ourselves in this Nigeria. Unless it’s just using GPT4 or Gemini API’s which doesn’t require PR to use. Almost every mid-level software engineer in Nigeria uses that already,” he said.
Another member of the tech community, Jerry U @1Mr_Styler responded to the Minister’s announcement by stating:
“My startup got a $200k grant from Google, all communications were through email. But here we are launching an “AI fund” and throwing a party for 60k$.
“May I ask you, what kind of AI research can be done with $60k even if the whole fund was granted to a single startup?”
Gideon Ajose @theGideonAjose while applauding the Minister’s efforts, expressed that the fund was too small to warrant such a high-profile announcement.
“Honestly, I applaud your efforts but this will not even move a needle in the AI needs of Nigeria.
“And it’s hurtful because if you weren’t in government and you were practicing privately, you’d never announce this. This is not enough to get started, we are too far behind!” he said.
Another stakeholder, Citizen Olu, acknowledged the initiative’s positive intentions but remarked that N100 million would be insufficient to make a significant impact on AI development in Nigeria.
“AI requires not just deep learning algorithms and vast amounts of data to train but also the hardware systems powered by POWERFUL networked GPUs and other massive computational cores produced by companies like NVIDIA and CEREBRAS. The cost of these systems is exorbitant without adding the cost of data scientists, AI specialists, etc.” he said.
Recall on Tuesday, the Ministry of Communications, in collaboration with Google, unveiled a N100 million AI Fund to support Nigerian startups utilizing Artificial Intelligence (AI) to create innovative solutions.
