iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Vukosi Marivate @vukosi.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

"Africa has no shortage of AI talent, groundbreaking research or innovative ideas. So why do so many promising AI innovations never make it into the hands of the people who need them?" Dog-fooding but for African tech with Vukosi Marivate | On What Terms? youtube.com/watch?v=zMXW...

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Vukosi Marivate @vukosi.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

OpenAI vs. Anthropic: Inside the Biggest Rivalry in Tech: A new world has arrived. Dario Amodei and Sam Altman cannot stop fighting over it. - The Atlantic

theatlantic.com

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/09/openai-v-anthropic-inside-biggest-rivalry-tech/688819/?gift=yOCyPCgFlJHcmtVyKr47rhGAB_Df6W1HFhl_sAnIi4o

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Vukosi Marivate @vukosi.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Out Now: Our new @WEF Global Future Council on Data Frontiers briefing paper, Data Sovereignty in Practice! 🌍 True sovereignty goes beyond data localization to full-stack control. 📄 Read here: reports.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Dat... Learn about our council initiatives.weforum.org/global-futur...

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Vukosi Marivate @vukosi.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

There is No Theoretical Curse of Multilinguality For Embedding Space Structure arxiv.org/abs/2608.17088

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Vukosi Marivate @vukosi.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Worth a read to ground yourself during this time of Fear Uncertainty and Doubt around Artificial Intelligence <> Misleading Metaphors and Real Risks: What To Fear from AI Agents and How to Reclaim Our Human Agency Melanie Mitchell - aiguide.substack.com/p/misleading...

aiguide.substack.com

Misleading Metaphors, Real Risks

What To Fear from AI Agents and How to Reclaim Our Human Agency

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Vukosi Marivate @vukosi.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Thinking in Public - No, AI will not kill us all. But handing companies control without accountability might. reflectingwide.blogspot.com/2026/09/no-a...

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Vukosi Marivate @vukosi.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

My sabbatical continues. This week speaking and learning at the AI in Context workshop in Germany at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. Will be presenting on Evaluation as Epistemic Justice in African NLP.

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Vukosi Marivate @vukosi.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

Watch our NEDLAC panel discussing AI, decent work, and inclusive growth with Anisa Khan, Thandile Zonke, Prof. Michael Sachs & Nozipho Tshabalala. Africa must move from being passive consumers of foreign AI to active R&D Watch the panel & Q&A here: youtu.be/654-8cmUTNs

youtu.be

NEDLAC Summit 2026: AI Panel - Advancing Inclusive Growth and Decent Work in the Age of AI

YouTube video by Data Science for Social Impact (DSFSI)

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Vukosi Marivate @vukosi.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

Learn about our #TextAugment tool <> The African-built tool helping the world’s under-resourced languages enter the AI age - birdstoryagency.com/ai-5/

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Vukosi Marivate @vukosi.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

The Killing of the Gaza Chef pca.st/episode/a80c...

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Vukosi Marivate @vukosi.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

What will be left for us to work on? www.normaltech.ai/p/what-will-...

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Vukosi Marivate @vukosi.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

Why AI hasn’t replaced software engineers, and won’t www.normaltech.ai/p/why-ai-has...

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Reposted by Vukosi Marivate

The Atlantic @theatlantic.com · 22/08/2026

Flying was once a rare, bounded period of time untethered from the world below—but good plane Wi-Fi is taking that luxury away, @nancywalecki.bsky.social writes.

bit.ly

Airplane Wi-Fi Is Great Now!

Oh no.

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Vukosi Marivate @vukosi.bsky.social · 22/08/2026

We are seeing similar challenges in universities. Our evaluation approach must change -> Does AI stop children from learning?: New data show the peril and promise of the technology The economist <> www.economist.com/graphic-deta... Internet Archive: archive.ph/qAPft

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Vukosi Marivate @vukosi.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

The Deep Learning Indaba is, and always will be, its people 🌍💡 @deeplearningindaba.bsky.social Reflecting on #DLI2026 at Pan-Atlantic University in Lagos, Nigeria, I wrote about what makes this community unique and why its travelling nature matters. Read the post 👇 www.vima.co.za/2026/08/18/t... 1/

vima.co.za

The Deep Learning Indaba is, and always will be, its people [post Deep Learning Indaba 2026]

During the Mutapa Empire, which encompassed parts of what are now Zimbabwe and Mozambique, the royal court, the dzimbahwe, moved from place to place rather than remaining in a single location. As i…

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Vukosi Marivate @vukosi.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

Still understudied "Knowledge work’s one saving grace, until recently, was that it was still executed by humans.............Now, AI agents are increasingly executing much of that work for Knowledge Workers." Why Is Everyone In Tech So Sad? | NOEMA www.noemamag.com/why-is-every...

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Vukosi Marivate @vukosi.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

Quantified World, and a great home project <> A Physicist Rigged His Pet Hamster’s Wheel to Upload to Strava. It Runs Surprisingly Far Every Night www.runnersworld.com/news/a733551...

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Vukosi Marivate @vukosi.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

Coverage of the work of DSFSI Lab member, and AfriDSAI emerging fellow Dr Seani Rananga <> PhD study develops AI to spot fake news in SA languages

timeslive.co.za

PhD study develops AI to spot fake news in SA languages

Multilingual AI study aims to expand language coverage and address deepfakes, hate speech and online harm

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Reposted by Vukosi Marivate

Data Science for Social Impact @dsfsi.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

1/🇳🇬 The countdown is on for #DLI2026 in Lagos, Nigeria! The @dsfsi_up lab is heading to the Deep Learning Indaba (2–7 August 2026). Here is a thread of where you can find our team, research, and workshops throughout the week! 👇 www.dsfsi.co.za/blog/dsfsi-a...

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Vukosi Marivate @vukosi.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

Worth a read <> Analysis: Navigating the Constitutional Anatomy of Copyright in the Age of AI A Technical Breakdown by AfriDSAI Senior Fellow Prof. Chijioke Okorie on South Africa's Copyright Amendment Bill

up.ac.za

Analysis: Navigating the Constitutional Anatomy of Copyright in the Age of AI

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Reposted by Vukosi Marivate

Alexander Hoyle @alexanderhoyle.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

A (very small) silver lining of writing a metareview with dozens of spammed LLM rebuttals is that occasionally the authors' unproofed generated response gives the game away by saying something like "Your criticism is spot on—it points to a serious oversight that requires a major revision."

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Paris Marx @parismarx.com · 26/07/2026

Good thing we don’t have a long history of people incorrectly projecting human traits on computers and overestimating what they’re really doing.

In computer science, the ELIZA effect is a tendency to project human traits—such as experience, semantic comprehension or empathy—onto rudimentary computer programs. ELIZA was a symbolic AI chatbot developed in 1966 by Joseph Weizenbaum that imitated a psychotherapist. Many early users were supposedly convinced of ELIZA's intelligence and understanding, despite its basic text-processing approach and the explanations of its limitations.

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Reposted by Vukosi Marivate

gquaggiotto.bsky.social @gquaggiotto.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

For a long time, the academic system has struggled to recognise software development as “core” research. Code was often treated as a byproduct of a paper, rather than a primary research output in its own right www.dsfsi.co.za/blog/ideas-m...

dsfsi.co.za

Ideas Must Travel: How TextAugment, Community, and Collaboration Won at the “Science Oscars”

Image: Prof. Vukosi Marivate receiving the inaugural NSTF-SADiLaR Research Software Award for Human Language Technologies on stage at the NSTF-South32 Awards.

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AIMMLab—Artificial Intelligence and Mathematical Modelling Lab @aimmlab.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

Toward a new collaboration in AI for Global Health Security 🌍 AIMMLab was pleased to welcome Prof. Vukosi Marivate, Director of AfriDSAI at the University of Pretoria, for discussions on advancing collaboration between UofT and UP in AI, data science, modeling, and health security. #AIMMLab

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Reposted by Vukosi Marivate

Peter van Heusden (he/him) 🗿 @pvanheus.bsky.social · 18/07/2026

research software in South Africa (and the Global South more generally) either don't see themselves as researchers or don't see themselves as software engineers. Thus we decided to pivot from a purely "ground up" approach to promoting research software in high level fora. Glad your team benefitted!

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Reposted by Vukosi Marivate

Peter van Heusden (he/him) 🗿 @pvanheus.bsky.social · 18/07/2026

Thanks to SADILAR for sponsoring this year's awards (they are *not cheap!) and I must thank my colleage in RSSE.Africa, Anelda van der Walt, for conceiving of and pushing this was to recognise Research Software. Honestly its been a rocky road with RSSE.Africa as many who create

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Reposted by Vukosi Marivate

arxiv cs.CL @arxiv-cs-cl.bsky.social · 01/07/2026

Kesego Mokgosi, Vukosi Marivate, Sitwala Mundia, Unarine Netshifhefhe, Tsholofelo Hope Mogale, Thapelo Sindane Tone-Conditioned Curriculum Learning for Low-Resource Bantu Speech Recognition arxiv.org/abs/2606.31642

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Reposted by Vukosi Marivate

arXiv cs.CL Computation and Language @cscl-bot.bsky.social · 02/07/2026

Kesego Mokgosi, Vukosi Marivate, Sitwala Mundia, Unarine Netshifhefhe, Tsholofelo Hope Mogale, Thapelo Sindane: Tone-Conditioned Curriculum Learning for Low-Resource Bantu Speech Recognition arxiv.org/abs/2606.31642 arxiv.org/pdf/2606.31642 arxiv.org/html/2606.31642

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Vukosi Marivate @vukosi.bsky.social · 06/07/2026

Day 0 of the UN Global AI Dialogue and ITU AI for Good Summit. Sharing the afternoon with my mentor Prof Tshilidzi Marwala. Catching up and discussing our shared future as a continent. @tmarwala

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Vukosi Marivate @vukosi.bsky.social · 01/07/2026

In my inaugural lecture (2025) I posit that GenAI is increasing our Language Dev Debt & increasing it's interest rate (increasing extinction) This paper shows it <> Artificial intelligence is creating a new global linguistic hierarchy (Occhini et Al) arxiv.org/abs/2602.12018

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Vukosi Marivate @vukosi.bsky.social · 25/06/2026

I’m pleased to be speaking at the AI for Good Global Summit 2026 in Geneva from 7-10 July. As the leading United Nations’ platform on #AI, the Summit brings together global leaders, innovators and experts to explore how AI is being applied across society. aiforgood.itu.int/summit26/

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