Meta said on 11 September 2024 how Kenya-based Upeo Labs is using Llama 3 and Llama 3.1 to power Somo-GPT, a multi-subject teaching assistant for high school students, teachers and parents.
Somo-GPT covers subjects from biology and physics to menstrual and mental health through a conversational interface, and is intended to support Kenya’s nationally approved high school curriculum.
Founder and CEO Roy Murwa Khasiani said the product is scalable because every African country has a nationally approved high school curriculum that could benefit. He built much of the stack himself after funding issues interrupted his studies at Strathmore University.
Upeo Labs used prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation and data engineering to fine-tune the models, and said it drew on Meta’s responsible AI guidelines.
Students, teachers and parents can access Somo-GPT on phones, tablets and laptops. Khasiani credited open-source models, including Llama, with making generative AI affordable enough to serve Kenyan schools.