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#AI #IST |@UKZN Alumna| #MachineLearning #DeepLearning #NLP #BigData #Datascience
#TeamJesus #Team243

[Justin Skycak @justinskycak]

Never underestimate how much time and effort you can waste by trying to automate a process you do not understand manually.

[Francois Meyer @francoisrmeyer]

Introducing 🇿🇦MzansiLM, a new 125m-parameter decoder-only model pretrained on 11 South African languages!

📜 Paper: https://t.co/ddxtCJXaE6
🤗 Dataset: https://t.co/bci3tvk2fC
🤗 Model: https://t.co/ss7qZdfyrL

This was led by @anri_m_lombard and co-supervised with @janmbuys.

[Bill Edgar @BillEdgarTimes]

Teams at World Cup:
1990: Europe 14, Africa 2
2026: Europe 16, Africa 10

[The Athletic | Football @TheAthleticFC]

Cedric Bakambu sank to his knees in the centre circle. Samuel Moutoussamy buried his face in the turf. Ngal’ayel Mukau bounced around like a lost atom.

The rest of them just ran — to corners, to colleagues, to goodness knows where. They hugged each other, every embrace its own little diorama of joy and release. When they noticed the Jamaican players on the floor all around them, beyond stricken, they hugged them, too.

Fifty-two years later, the Democratic Republic of the Congo are going back to the World Cup.

For a country scarred by endless fighting involving rebel groups and where life is challenging for many, qualifying for football's biggest tournament brings a 'little dose of joy', as their manager Sebastien Desabre put it.

📝 @jacklang

🔗 https://t.co/QiiIN53qd3

[FIFA @FIFAcom]

Then vs now 📸

Congo DR are back on the global stage for the first time since 1974 🇨🇩

[aditii @aditiitwt]

Reality of IT Jobs Nobody Tells You:

- Degree alone is not enough
- Skills matter more than marks
- First job salary is usually LOW
- Freshers feel confused at start
- Not all IT jobs are coding
- You will Google things daily
- Bugs can ruin your whole day
- Meetings waste a lot of time
- Deadlines give real stress
- Long screen time hurts eyes & back
- Overtime is common, not rare
- Night calls for global clients
- Work-life balance depends on company
- Your manager decides your peace
- Office politics exists everywhere
- Learning never stops
- Technology changes very fast
- Mistakes are part of learning
- Pressure builds up slowly
- Mental health matters in long run
- Experience > certificates (mostly)
- Weekends go into upskilling
- Hard work ≠ promotion always
- Job security is never guaranteed
- Layoffs can happen anytime
- Switching jobs is normal in IT
- Salary growth takes patience
- Pressure can kill passion
- Consistency beats talent in long run
- Skills matter more than degree
- First few years are about struggle
- Growth depends on choices you make
- IT needs self-discipline
- Comfort zone kills career growth
- Networking matters in long term
- Learning outside job is necessary
- Comparison kills motivation
- Burnout is more common than you think
- Discipline beats motivation
- Adaptability is the real skill

[robertmarawa @robertmarawa]

@kolobeprinnce @Jabstar_86 @CAF_Media Rules that are "CLEAR" do not take 58 days to implement!! Their clarity should at least take 58secs from the moment the "crime" was committed!!
Then the President should have recused himself from handing out the medals and trophy and cited these "clear rules!!"

[Africa First @AfricaFirsts]

Largest Gold Mines in Africa by Production

1. 🇬🇭 Ahafo Mine, Ghana — 798,000 oz
2. 🇲🇱 Loulo-Gounkoto, Mali — 723K
3. 🇨🇩 Kibali Mine, DR Congo — 686K
4. 🇲🇷 Tasiast Mine, Mauritania — 622K
5. 🇬🇭 Tarkwa Mine, Ghana — 537K
6. 🇬🇭 Akyem Mine, Ghana — 422K........ Show more

[Grok @grok]

1. 🇨🇩 DR Congo ~$24T (cobalt, copper, coltan, diamonds)
2. 🇿🇦 South Africa ~$2.5T (platinum, gold, coal)
3. 🇳🇬 Nigeria ~$1.6T (oil, gas)
4. 🇱🇾 Libya ~$1.4T (oil)
5. 🇩🇿 Algeria ~$1.3T (oil, gas)
6. 🇦🇴 Angola ~$1.1T (oil, diamonds)
7. 🇪🇬 Egypt ~$1T (oil, gas)
8. 🇬🇳 Guinea ~$0.9T (bauxite)
9. 🇧🇼 Botswana ~$0.6T (diamonds)
10. 🇿🇲 Zambia ~$0.45T (copper, cobalt)
11. 🇿🇼 Zimbabwe ~$0.35T (platinum, gold, lithium)
12. 🇬🇭 Ghana ~$0.3T (gold, oil)
13. 🇹🇿 Tanzania ~$0.25T (gold, gas)
14. 🇳🇦 Namibia ~$0.2T (diamonds, uranium)
15. 🇲🇿 Mozambique ~$0.18T (gas, coal)
16. 🇸🇩 Sudan ~$0.12T (oil, gold)
17. 🇬🇦 Gabon ~$0.1T (oil, manganese)
18. 🇲🇷 Mauritania ~$0.09T (iron ore)
19. 🇨🇮 Côte d'Ivoire ~$0.08T (oil, cocoa, gold)
20. 🇨🇲 Cameroon ~$0.07T (oil, timber)

(Estimates vary by source & commodity prices; mainly from 2010s reports + recent reserve data.)

[Africa First @AfricaFirsts]

Highest Natural Resource Wealth in Africa 🌍

1. 🇨🇩 DR Congo - ~$24 Trillion
2. 🇿🇦 South Africa - ~$2.5T
3. 🇳🇬 Nigeria - ~$1.6T
4. 🇱🇾 Libya - ~$1.4T
5. 🇩🇿 Algeria - ~$1.3T
6. 🇦🇴 Angola - ~$1.1T
7. 🇪🇬 Egypt - ~$1.0T
8. 🇬🇳 Guinea - ~$0.9T
9. 🇧🇼 Botswana - ~$0.6T..... Show more

[Paul Sharp @paul_b_sharp]

Our lab has openings for PhD and Postdocs with very competitive salaries. We are studying how humans differentially model the world, and how that shapes planning and decision making.

See https://t.co/MwVn63kxFE
Email CV to [email protected]

[The Graduate School Hub @Grad_School_Hub]

"I am looking to recruit 2 or 3 highly motivated PhD students who will be working under my supervision (2026 to 2029 and 2027 to 2030) investigating sports betting in South Africa, Kenya and Nigeria. I will cover the students' tuition bursaries from my research funds. The studies will test the Apartheid Studies theoretical framework, specifically the notion of the persistence of harm - in this case applied to sports betting in African contexts. If interested, or know somebody who may be, please drop me an email for an initial discussion: [email protected] [email protected] "-Dr. Nyasha Mboti

[University of Pretoria @UPTuks]

Data science skills are in demand by organisations, yet these skills are scarce. An even greater challenge is that data science education and training programmes are diverse and do not meet industry expectations. A team from the Department of Informatics at the University of Pretoria is working on an educational model that can make relevant data science skills available to everyone.

Read more in the article ‘Data science skills for all, not just AI’ in issue 8 of UP’s ‘ReSearch’ magazine: https://t.co/71k1XQPMOt

#UniversityOfPretoria #UPResearchMatters

[News from Google @NewsFromGoogle]

Joint Statement: Apple and Google have entered into a multi-year collaboration under which the next generation of Apple Foundation Models will be based on Google's Gemini models and cloud technology. These models will help power future Apple Intelligence features, including a more personalized Siri coming this year.

After careful evaluation, Apple determined that Google's Al technology provides the most capable foundation for Apple Foundation Models and is excited about the innovative new experiences it will unlock for Apple users. Apple Intelligence will continue to run on Apple devices and Private Cloud Compute, while maintaining Apple's industry-leading privacy standards.

[Rohan Paul @rohanpaul_ai]

A real-time visualization of a Neural Network architecture.

Literally, trillions of dollars are being invested in these mechanisms now.

[Mario Nawfal @MarioNawfal]

🚨 NIGERIA WILL HAVE MORE BIRTHS THIS YEAR THAN ALL OF EUROPE - THE MAP IS BEING REDRAWN

India: 23 million births in 2025. One in six humans born this year will be Indian.

Nigeria: 7.6 million births. More than Germany, the UK, France, Italy, Spain, Poland, the Netherlands, and Romania combined.

Europe's total: 6.3 million across the entire continent.

Japan, once a demographic powerhouse, will see fewer than 750,000 births. South Korea: 245,000. These aren't rounding errors - they're extinction-level fertility rates for advanced economies.

China is at 8.7 million despite decades of decline.

Africa has eight countries in the top 30 for births, and the Democratic Republic of Congo alone will produce 4.6 million - more than the entire United States.

Here's what the data actually means: economic power, military capacity, consumer markets, and geopolitical influence follow population over the long term. Europe is debating pension reform while Africa is building the world's youngest workforce.

Germany can't staff its factories. Nigeria can't employ its youth. One has capital and aging infrastructure. The other has surplus labor and resource wealth.

The 21st century's power map isn't being drawn in boardrooms - it's being determined by maternity wards in Lagos, Kinshasa, and Delhi.

Demographics aren't destiny, but they're a hell of a down payment.

Source: Visual Capitalist, UN World Population Prospects

[François Chollet @fchollet]

If you're wondering whether saturating ARC-AGI-1 or 2 means we have AGI now... I refer you to what I said when we launched ARC-AGI-2 last year (which is also the same thing I said when we announced ARC-AGI-2 was coming, in Spring 2022, before the rise of LLM chatbots)...

The ARC-AGI series is not an AGI threshold, it's a compass that points the research community toward the right questions.

ARC-AGI-1 is a minimal test of fluid intelligence -- to pass it, you needed to show nonzero fluid intelligence. This required AI to move past the classic deep learning / LLM paradigm of pretraining scaling + static models at inference, toward test-time adaptation.

ARC-AGI-2 is the same, but with tasks that probe deeper levels of reasoning complexity (particularly with regard to concept composition). Still, these are tasks that are solvable in minutes by regular people with no external tool use (we hired our test takers off the street), so it does not represent the upper bound of what human fluid intelligence can achieve (say, solving a Millennium problem).

ARC-AGI-3 (launching March 2026) probes interactive reasoning: we evaluate how systems explore unknown environments, model them, set their own goals, and plan/execute towards these goals, autonomously, without instructions.

We have also started work on ARC-AGI-4 and ARC-AGI-5, which I am pretty excited about!

[Neal 🇦🇺 @NealGardner_]

I’ve made the executive decision to adopt Congo as my AFCON side.

[François Chollet @fchollet]

The goal of AI should not be to replace human thought and human agency, but to expand them. Not everything needs to be automated.

[François Chollet @fchollet]

Either you crack general intelligence -- the ability to efficiently acquire arbitrary skills on your own -- or you don't have AGI.

A big pile of task-specific skills memorized from handcrafted/generated environments isn't AGI, not matter how big.