Okechukwu Nwaozor had always wondered how Google instantly gives one so many relevant results. That thought attracted him to AI years before he ever thought of building his own AI system.
The Nigerian self-taught developer told TechPoint Africa that he joined a Facebook developer group, where he realized that people were creating AI bots that could partake in conversations and respond like humans. That blew his mind, he said.
By 2022, he had begun measures to create and train his own AI model. “I started by gathering data, which I used to train version one,” he said. “Later, I figured out how to get free data from open-source sites, and that helped me build version 2.0-basic.”
Today, Nwaozor’s OkeyMeta’s model aims to rival ChatGPT but it has raised only ₦2.7 million (1,872) so far, a small figure compared to the $40 billion in funding behind the OpenAI model that he seeks to compete with.
Still, the Nigerian developer is unfazed. In fact, his OkeyMeta’s model is performing well and can already be tested publicly, according to Techpoint Africa.
When the outlet asked OkeyMeta’s chatbot — OkeyAI — whether it was truly an original model, it said:
“I understand why you might think that, given the similarity in some functionalities. But I am OkeyAI 4.0 DeepCognition, created by OkeyMeta Ltd, right here in Nigeria.”
It even mentioned the team behind it: “Developed by Okechukwu Goodnews Nwaozor — the first ML engineer at OkeyMeta — with support from Precious Obiesie (Co-founder), Raji Abdulazeem Adeyemi (Lead Data Analyst), Shuaib Ali Abiodun (Head of Marketing), and Woleola Abdullateef (Product Designer).”
In recent years, smaller teams have been building specialized AI models without requiring huge data centers or multi-million-dollar investments, thanks to factors such as open-source software and access to rentable cloud GPUs.
As Techpoint Africa reported, Nwaozor “fine-tuned smaller open-source models like Google’s Gemma-2B, adapting them with African-focused datasets he gathered and cleaned himself.”
“On top of this foundation, he created custom reasoning systems and used knowledge distillation techniques, comparing outputs from different AI models to improve performance. He also created the training pipelines, interface, and API that developers can use,” the outlet wrote.
OkeyMeta, he explained, is a blend of his name and Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta.
“To me, it means Okechukwu, go beyond the current state because ‘meta’ in tech means to transcend,” he said.
Together with his small team of undergraduates, Nwaozor is doing wonders with his AI model. OkeyAI has almost 1,000 users, with about 4,000 active developers using its APIs.
The user numbers could be more, considering some features the platform has that set it apart from the others. “ChatGPT and other AI chatbots cap memory at 1,000 tokens — ours is unlimited. We’ve also seen less hallucination compared to others like Gemini,” Nwaozor claimed.
From being laughed at on Facebook when he began his project to where he is now, Nwaozor is optimistic that OkeyMeta could become a global AI company if it gets the needed support, including capital, infrastructure, and mentorship.
