{"id":643939,"date":"2026-05-09T16:00:14","date_gmt":"2026-05-09T14:00:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/?p=643939"},"modified":"2026-05-09T16:08:59","modified_gmt":"2026-05-09T14:08:59","slug":"one-area-where-south-africa-can-compete-with-the-united-states-and-china-on-ai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/science\/643939-one-area-where-south-africa-can-compete-with-the-united-states-and-china-on-ai.html","title":{"rendered":"One area where South Africa can compete with the United States and China on AI"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

According to Benjamin Rosman, head of the University of Witwatersrand’s MIND Institute, South Africa can compete with global leaders like the United States and China in the field of AI through research.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Specifically, research that seeks ways to make AI more efficient and use less energy to perform computational tasks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He said that although AI required enormous amounts of energy, stacks of GPUs, and thousands of litres of water, humans could accomplish incredible processing feats powered by a spoonful of peanut butter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“We can’t beat OpenAI at their game, right? Because then we’d need just piles and piles of compute that feasibly we would never get,” said Rosman.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“We don’t have a gazillion GPUs. We’ve got other strengths. So, can we find other ways to compete in that space?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This was a major focus of the Wits MIND Institute, one of South Africa’s foremost think tanks, where he said cutting-edge research on AI was being conducted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In an interview with MyBroadband, Rosman called the institute an “upstream engine room” or “ideation room.” Its official goal is to tackle AI policy and governance in Africa.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It seeks to collect the brightest minds, not just in AI and engineering, but across other disciplines and solve problems “in ways that are not being done in other places.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To do this, the researchers and fellows of Wits MIND are comparing the way the human brain works to unlock new ways AI could function.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“There are only two things that can produce poetry,” he told us. “The human brain and large language models.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of South Africa’s competitive advantages is its talent, and Wits MIND Institute draws on academics and experts from various disciplines. Only about a third of the institute’s academics are focused on AI.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Uniting experts across disciplines for South African AI research<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\"\"
Benjamin Rosman, head of the Wits MIND Institute<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The institute includes fellows and researchers working on neuroanatomy, behavioural psychology, philosophy and ethics, game design, computer science, engineering, health sciences and the humanities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rosman said the institute brought people together who care about intelligence “from every area you can think of.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The institute operates on a regular schedule of meetings, workshops and seminars with the objective of bringing diverse experts together to discuss intelligence and AI.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

About once a month, they hold deep-dive workshops on specific topics, such as AI safety or consciousness. They also host weekly seminars where they invite speakers and experts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The primary goal of these gatherings is to spark unusual topics and discussions, ultimately leading to new project ideas, co-supervision models and new policy documents.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Other frequent activities of the institute include regularly issuing calls for funding and organising teams for grant applications.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2024, Wits MIND received R16.5 million in grant funding from Google to accelerate scientific research in the AI space through external collaborators.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rosman said the institute used portions of the Google grant to provide additional seed funding for collaborative, interdisciplinary projects that are “something crazy and different.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He explained that this model enabled the institute to push research and thinking on AI and robotics in entirely new directions, not just in Africa but across the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This method also provided MIND with a way to address certain challenges, the most pressing being funding. “Building in the face of constraints is a really good way to do things,” he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Recent projects Rosman and the team at Wits MIND worked on included a method to simulate sleep deprivation in large language models.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“If we understand what sleep deprivation looks like in the human brain, can we try to replicate that in an AI model and then use that to study where failure modes of it exist?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another project had medical researchers dissecting different animal brains to understand their underlying architecture, with the goal of discovering biological structures not currently modelled in AI.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There was also a project using AI models to understand elephant communication, which the institute selected as the best candidate for such research among other animals with sophisticated communication.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rosman said that understanding this could influence how South Africa and the world build AI models in the future, making them more efficient and requiring less energy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He said that Wits MIND was less concerned with a project’s success probability and more with the uniqueness of a piece of research. The institute was driven by the generation of knowledge for its own sake.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“What does it mean for a project to fail?” he asked.\u00a0“In an academic space, you’re generating knowledge. A failure means you now know it isn’t a good idea. That’s still knowledge.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Wits MIND Institute brings together top scientists and researchers in South Africa to find ways to compete with the world’s AI leaders.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":341213,"featured_media":643944,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31750],"tags":[27887,104785,104858,30514,104857],"class_list":["post-643939","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-science","tag-ai","tag-benjamin-rosman","tag-think-tank","tag-university-of-the-witwatersrand","tag-wits-mind-institute"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/643939"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/341213"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=643939"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/643939\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":644127,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/643939\/revisions\/644127"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/643944"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=643939"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=643939"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=643939"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}