Isheanesu Misi · AI engineer
Language models for African languages, trained from scratch.
Drag to throw · double-tap the floor
Selected work
Recognition
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01
MORENA
A 1.5-billion-parameter open-weight language model trained from scratch for twelve African languages, plus English and French. 251.7 billion pretraining tokens, about 12,661 A100 GPU-hours on the CINECA Leonardo supercomputer, released under Apache-2.0.
On its model card it posts the lowest African bits-per-byte of the 26 models measured, 1.408.
- ChiShona
- Kiswahili
- Hausa
- Yorùbá
- Igbo
- isiZulu
- isiXhosa
- Kinyarwanda
- Setswana
- Afrikaans
- isiNdebele
- Nigerian Pidgin
Press: Tech In Africa, allAfrica
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02
Google for Startups
Mentor in Google for Startups programmes, working with early-stage founders.
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03
Meta Llama Impact Grant
Awarded to the language-AI startup I co-founded and ran engineering for. One of five winners across Africa, announced at the UN General Assembly’s Unstoppable Africa event in New York.
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04
NBA Africa Triple-Double Startup Accelerator
One of ten startups from seven African countries chosen to pitch at Demo Day at NBA headquarters in New York.
Timeline
So far
MORENA released. Open weights, Apache-2.0, trained from scratch on CINECA Leonardo.
MORENA tools open-sourced. Tool calling from Pidgin, Yoruba, Igbo and Hausa on a laptop CPU.
Meta Llama Impact Grant. Announced at the UN General Assembly in New York.
NBA Africa Demo Day finalist. Pitched at NBA headquarters, New York.
Started building in public on GitHub.
Now
Open source
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MORENA tools
Fine-tuning 208M and 503M MORENA models to call real APIs from Pidgin, Yoruba, Igbo and Hausa, on a laptop CPU. On a held-out payments menu the 503M model picks the right tool every time, up from 9% for the base model.
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kaviri
An open-source recording browser that films product demos from a script in your repository, in CI, with the camera moves derived from the interactions.