This 17-year old Nigerian wants to take on ChatGPT by building his own LLM from scratch
With a team of six undergraduates and ₦2.7 million, 17-year-old Okechuckwu Nwaozor, wants to take on OpenAI by building his own LLM from scratch. While people laugh at him, 8,000 developers now use his API.
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Okechukwu Nwaozor had to pardon my chuckle when he told me he wanted to build a rival to ChatGPT. The disbelief was natural: he is a first-time founder, fresh out of secondary school, just seventeen, and a completely self-taught developer. <br />
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I chuckled again when he mentioned he’d raised ₦2.7 million — pocket change compared to OpenAI, the $500 billion company with over $40 billion in funding behind the model he’s trying to compete with.<br />
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But on a call with Techpoint Africa, Nwaozor made it clear he understood how unbelievable his ambitions sounded. <br />
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He’s been laughed at before. When he first announced on Facebook that he was building his own AI model, the comments ranged from disbelief to outright mockery. “People told me it couldn’t be done,” he recalls.<br />
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The doubt didn’t stop him. As unbelievable as it seems for a 17-year-old Nigerian to challenge a Silicon Valley giant, Nwaozor simply kept building. And he didn’t just build an idea, he built a working product. OkeyMeta’s model can already be tested publicly, and it performs well enough that I initially doubted it was truly trained from scratch.<br />
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When I asked OkeyMeta’s chatbot — OkeyAI — whether it was really an original model, it responded confidently:“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.<br />
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“It even credited its team: “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).”<br />
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A conversation with OkeyAI<br />
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The story matched everything Nwaozor told me. But it left one question: how does a 17-year-old decide he’s going to build a large language model from scratch?<br />
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The inspiration for OkeyMeta <br />
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A conversation with OkeyAI<br />
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You would expect Nwaozor’s mot...
