Skip to main content

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

  • News Feature
  • Published:

The other AI revolution: how the Global South is building and repurposing language models that speak to billions

While leading tech companies race to build ever-larger models, researchers in Brazil, India and Africa are using clever tricks to remix big labs’ LLMs to bring AI to billions of users.

This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution

Access options

Buy this article

USD 39.95

Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout

References

  1. Vaswani, A. et al. Attention is all you need. In Proc. 31st Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS, 2017).

  2. Sane, S. et al. MARC: A multi-scale and multi-lingual code-switching benchmark for large language models. In Proc. 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (ACL Anthology, 2024).

  3. Shormani, M. Q. & Al‑Samki, A. A. F1000Res. https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.165879.1 (2025).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. Foo, L. T. E. & Ng, L. H. X. Disentangling Singlish discourse particles with task-driven representation. In Proc. 6th ACM International Conference on Multimedia in Asia Workshops (Association for Computing Machinery, 2024).

  5. Ng, R. et al. Preprint at https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.05747 (2025).

  6. Gala, J. et al. Preprint at https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.15006 (2024).

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Pedro Burgos.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Burgos, P. The other AI revolution: how the Global South is building and repurposing language models that speak to billions. Nat Comput Sci 5, 691–694 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43588-025-00865-y

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Version of record:

  • Issue date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s43588-025-00865-y

Search

Quick links

Nature Briefing

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Get the most important science stories of the day, free in your inbox. Sign up for Nature Briefing