small AI is the all the rage in Africa where you cant connect to internet, it must be able to run locally on a small devicehttps://spectrum.ieee.org/small-language-models-ai-pharmaceuticalsOne morning in 2019, Adebayo Alonge was in a Cape Town hotel room, preparing to demonstrate his startup's database answer to a serious problem in African health care: counterfeit medication, which kills thousands of people across the continent every year. The RxScanner is a African made handheld spectrometer that scans a pill with infrared light, then sends the item's molecular profile to an AI model equipped with a pharmaceutical database. In seconds, the database identifies the medication from its molecular profile -- or reports that it's phony. Scanner made with Chinese parts, but built by Africans and the idea was African as well.Pharmacies were using the system in more than a dozen African countries, including Ghana, Kenya, Myanmar, and Alonge's native Nigeria.But that morning in South Africa, it didn't work. "I was shocked," Alonge says.. It wouldnt work because it couldn't connect to internet. Broadband wireless was down in the entire city for a day or so.From that point on they knew they need something that works locally.From this need, in 2022, a local AI model emerged which is trained on internet database of data on pill's.The work birthed a new version of his device, which can authenticate a pill in places without broadband, computers, or even reliable electricity. A mobile phone is needed. It also turned Alonge into an advocate for this kind of "small AI"."The article goes on to detail other immediately useful 'small' AI applications without any subscription or billion dollar data centers needed," writes locator16.
>>538482785Is that riley reid?
>>538482785Yeah you can run small models like Qwen 3 on Android phone or on a SBC like Raspberry Pi.On Android you can use the PocketPal AI or OffGrid AI to install Qwen locally.
>>538483205Some of those models still ask for internet connection so better be careful
>>538482785an infrared LED is enough to do molecular analysis? That's pretty neat.
>>538483267I'm testing Offline AI right now. It looks good.You can use it to run AI models locally on Android device, or you can configure it to use a network instance on your local WiFi network. Neither of these need internet access, the app insists on it's offline abilities
>>538484279it works on "pure pills" since they shouldnt contain a lot of shit that is not supposed to be in ityou cant use LED to do an analysis on a piece of watermelon, there is too many different competing chemicals all over it
>>538484582*Offgrid AISource and APK available here:https://github.com/off-grid-ai/off-grid-ai-mobile
>Scanner made with Chinese parts, but built by Africans and the idea was African as well.>The RxScanner is a African made handheld spectrometerThis reminds me of that story where a black British kid "invented a computer" by assembling a desktop pc.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RxAllOh never mind it's an American company run by two chinks and a Nigerian from Yale University.This is not real African.
>>538482816 No, Haley Lujan
