Kenya-based Upeo Labs is a generative AI research and development startup aiming to solve local challenges. Its initial offering, Somo-GPT, is a support tool for high school students, teachers, and parents. Powered by Llama 3 and Llama 3.1, Somo-GPT serves as a multi-subject teaching assistant, where people can ask questions on subjects like menstrual health, mental health, biology, geography, physics, history, and more, while interacting with a conversational chat interface. Upeo Labs created Somo-GPT to support Kenya’s national curriculum digitization for high schools. Currently, Somo-GPT is being used in closed beta at 500 high schools across the country.

“Somo is proof that you can do anything with minimal resources if you believe in your vision with all your heart and execute with child-like faith,” says Roy Murwa Khasiani, founder and CEO of Upeo Labs. “And Somo-GPT is scalable, since every African country has a nationally approved high school curriculum that could benefit.”

“There is no Upeo Labs without the efforts of the open source community, especially big players such as Meta,” he says. “Our efforts to democratize generative AI in Kenya depend on quality open source models. We believe access to generative AI is a human right of the near future, if not the present already.”

Khasiani adds that Llama and other open source generative AI contributions enable players like Upeo Labs to serve customers at a very reasonable price.

“This increases the possibility of participation in the AI revolution for the entire globe, as evidenced by our own application,” Khasiani says. He adds that the performance gap between open and closed generative models is essentially shut.

“Now—more than ever—economies can introduce digital transformation to entire sectors using open models,” he says. “With affordable APIs available, geography is not a barrier. I say, ‘Jump in!’”