The Federal Government has launched a new large language model (LLM) named N-ATLAS, an open-source, multilingual, and multimodal model capable of processing Yoruba, Hausa, Igbo, and Nigerian-accented English.

A statement shared on X by the Minister of Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy, Dr Bosun Tijani stated that the stated that the artificial intelligence was showcased on the sidelines of the 80th United Nations General Assembly in New York.

The minister revealed that the N-Atlas will explore the diversity of African voices, placing it at the core of artificial intelligence, as a major step in making Africa a key contributor in shaping the future.

He wrote, “We just released N-ATLAS v1 — Nigeria’s open-source, multilingual & multimodal Large Language Model — on the sidelines of #UNGA80 in New York. Starting with Yoruba, Hausa, Igbo and Nigerian-accented English, N-ATLAS places Africa’s voices and diversity at the foundation of AI.

“This is the first step in a broader journey to make Africa a contributor and leader in shaping AI’s future.”

https://x.com/bosuntijani/status/1969513639666135228   

The product was built by the National Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics and partners, including Awarri Technologies, as part of Nigeria’s language-AI initiative.

According to the information available on the website, the AI model is a state-of-the-art automatic speech recognition model for the three main local languages spoken in Nigeria, Yoruba, Hausa, and Igbo.

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The technology is fine-tuned on the Whisper Small architecture, a model powered by Awarri Technologies and an initiative of the Federal Ministry of Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy to advance indigenous language technologies and promote digital inclusion.

N-ATLaS-LLM is a fine-tuned multilingual language model based on Llama-3 8B, specifically designed to support African languages.

N-ATLaS-LLM is built on the Llama architecture and has been fine-tuned on over 400 million tokens of multilingual instruction data. The model demonstrates strong performance across multiple African languages while maintaining excellent English capabilities.

TVC previously reported that the Vice President Kashim Shettima will lead Nigeria’s delegation to the 80th United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) taking place in New York City from Monday, September 22 to Sunday, September 28, 2025.

According to a statement by Stanley Nkwocha, Senior Special Assistant to the President on Media and Communications (Office of the Vice President), Shettima will participate in a series of high-level engagements during the global summit, which also marks the 80th anniversary of the United Nations.

https://www.tvcnews.tv/shettima-to-lead-nigeria-to-80th-unga-in-new-york/