Products & Platforms
The AI We Don't Own
Five short reads on where artificial intelligence actually runs, and what it is costing us not to own it.
The Group Managing Director’s memorandum of 20 September establishes the Technology and Intelligence Council and sets the destination. What follows is not a summary of it. It is the reading behind the one question the memorandum leaves open, which is where artificial intelligence physically runs, who owns the machine it runs on, and what that ownership is worth. One short drop a day, about two minutes each.
Your laptop is already an AI supercomputer.
Most of the machine is idle, most of the time. Drop 01 of five short reads from VFD Group Technology, Products & Platforms.
The models are getting smaller, and the small ones are winning.
A 770 million parameter model beat a 540 billion parameter one. What you teach a model now matters more than how big it is.
Chat was never the product, and that is why most AI spending has returned nothing.
Ninety-five per cent of corporate AI pilots returned nothing measurable. The failure was organisational, not technical.
The Central Bank has already decided where our AI is allowed to run.
Payment transaction data generated in Nigeria must reside in Nigeria from 1 January 2027. That is one hundred and one days away, and every VFD payments asset is in scope.
We do not own the hardware, and owning it is the opportunity.
Africa holds eighteen per cent of the world’s people and under one per cent of its data-centre capacity. Read as an investment position rather than a complaint, that gap is the whole case.