Building a ChatGPT for the Arab World

AI is taking over the world, gradually transforming how we work and live.

Yet, many Arabic speakers risk being left out.

A few years ago, Mohammad AlSharekh, the renowned Kuwaiti entrepreneur who brought Arabic to computing, noticed something alarming.

Many Arabs had stopped using dictionaries.

They were too outdated and complicated, filled with archaic words and definitions.

AlSharekh’s solution was the release of Sakhr Software Company’s online Modern Arabic Dictionary, featuring 50 million Arabic vocabularies for everyday use.

In a TEDX Talk in 2018, he delivered a clear message: only Arabs can address the challenges facing the Arabic language.

In recent years, local founders and companies have embraced this challenge, to drive an Arabic AI revolution.

🌁 Bridging the Arabic AI gap

When ChatGPT was released, it was a total revelation.

But there was a big problem - it struggled enormously with Arabic.

Given that Arabic is spoken by over 400 million people, this is remarkable for all the wrong reasons.

The underperformance of major LLMs can be put down to a variety of factors:

1. Arabic is a complicated language: It’s filled with diacritical markings and an inflected letter system. Letters can take up to three shapes depending on their position and are often connected, which computers can struggle to make sense of.

2. Lack of online content: LLMs need training on vast amounts of digital text. Although Arabic is the fourth-most-spoken language globally, it makes up less than 1% of internet content. That’s not a lot for AI developers to play around with.

3. Diverse dialects: There are at least 25 dialects. Some are similar, but others can be difficult to understand even for Modern Standard Arabic speakers.

Add all of that together and you come out the other side with a language that’s harder to represent in a coding model than most others.

But if there’s one common thread that has emerged throughout this newsletter to date, it’s that MENA’s founders love a challenge.

And they don’t come much bigger that bridging the gap between the Arab-speaking world and advancements in AI.

📢 Finding their voice

Back in 2021, two founders from Egypt launched a startup called Intella, on a mission to do just that.