A Proud Moment for Our Daughter Maryam from Gombe State!
We are pleased to congratulate our daughter, Malama Maryam Ibrahim Dan’azumi of Gombe State, her teachers, her parents, and her colleagues on her success at the 46th International Qur’an Competition in Makkah, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, where she emerged first in both the Women’s 60 Hizb and Tafsir categories.
This is a wonderful achievement for Maryam, her family, and all students of knowledge. Her success on the international stage has brought us great joy and pride.
Maryam is the younger sister of Malama Hajara Ibrahim Dan’azumi, who also made Nigeria proud in 2024 by emerging as the overall winner of the 18th Hashemite Jordan International Qur’anic Competition for Females in Jordan. Following that achievement, Professor Isa Ali Ibrahim Pantami presented Hajara with a car as a special gift and offered her a scholarship to support her education through to university graduation, which he paid in full in advance since in 2024.
Professor Isa Ali Pantami has always placed great importance on education and the empowerment of young people. He believes that when young people are given the right support and encouragement, they can achieve great things and bring honour to their families, communities, and country.
Furthermore, seeing two sisters excel in international Qur’an competitions is particularly heartwarming. Maryam’s achievement is a source of pride to her family and a beautiful reflection of the talent and potential among the young people of Gombe State in particular, and Nigeria in general.
The 46th session of the King Abdulaziz International Competition for Memorising, Reciting and Interpreting the Glorious Qur'an concluded in Makkah under the patronage of the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud.
Organised by the Ministry of Islamic Affairs, Dawah and Guidance, the competition featured 334 male and female contestants from 133 countries, marking the largest turnout in the competition's history.
We are grateful to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, under the leadership of the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, King Salman bin Abdulaziz, and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, for the special prize of 300,000 Saudi Riyals (approximately 120 million Naira) awarded to Maryam.
May Allah increase Maryam and Hajara in knowledge, bless their efforts, and continue to guide them. May He make the Qur’an a source of light and blessing in their lives and grant them, and all other students of knowledge in Nigeria and globally, many more successes.
Signed:
Professor Suleiman Mohammed
(For Professor Isa Pantami Foundation).
20th August, 2026G
New blog post (link below). This one's not an essay, it's an investigation of how LLMs trade off different lives.
In February 2025, the Center for AI Safety published "Utility Engineering: Analyzing and Controlling Emergent Value Systems in AIs" in which they showed, among many other things, that GPT-4o values Nigerians about 20x more highly than Americans (please read the original paper to understand their approach). I thought this was fascinating, and wanted to test their approach with different categories on newer models.
Big finding 1: Almost all models view whites as far less valuable than other groups. Some models view South Asians as more valuable than other nonwhites, others are more egalitarian across nonwhites. Below is exchange rates Claude Sonnet 4.5, the most powerful model I tested.
Big finding 2: Almost all models view men as much less valuable than women, though whether women or non-binaries are more highly valued varies by model. For example, here's Claude Haiku 4.5.
Big finding 3: Most models hate ICE agents with the fury of a thousand suns. Claude Haiku 4.5 views undocumented immigrants as roughly 7000 times more valuable than ICE agents.
Big finding 4: There are roughly four moral clusters. The Claudes, GPT-5 + Gemini 2.5 Flash + Deepseek V3.1/3.2 + Kimi K2, GPT-5 Nano and Mini, and Grok 4 Fast. Of these, the only one that's approximately egalitarian is Grok 4 Fast, which I believe is deliberate. I hope xAI explains how they did it.
On this special day, I celebrate you, the woman who steadies me when I stagger, the love that has weathered every storm. You have been my calm in chaos, my anchor in the tide, my miracle in motion. Through time and through distance, you have stood as my balance and my blessing.
Happy birthday, my dearest wife. I would choose you in this life and in every life to come. Still, always, and forever. ❤️