This year’s Africa Tech Festival took place last week at the Cape Town International Convention Centre and hosted an estimated 15,000+ attendees, 400 speakers, and 300 exhibitors across its three days.
Like last year, Honor had a big presence at the event and invited local media to attend its keynote presentation and two panel discussions.
During all three, Honor took the opportunity to reaffirm its commitment to its ‘Alpha Plan‘ that it debuted earlier this year at Mobile World Congress.
In case you missed that announcement, Honor’s plan is to transition from a smartphone manufacturer to an ‘AI device ecosystem company’, with a $10-billion investment over the next five years. The company provided some proof of its transition with a few novel gadgets on display at its stand, like a chess-playing robot and a whole band’s worth of AI-powered digital instruments.
Honor’s Alpha Plan: Step 1
It is still early days, however, so the company is still on step one of its three-step Alpha Plan: create an intelligent device. We’re probably still a few years away from a truly intelligent device as seen in sci-fi films (if they’re even possible to begin with), but before we get there, Honor wants to make the AI we have today more accessible by bringing it to more affordable devices.
During a panel discussion between Honor South Africa’s CEO, Fred Zhou, Vodacom Group managing executive of brand, marketing, and communications, Andisa Ntsubane, and Geekhub founder and tech analyst, Akhram Mohamed, the three panellists agreed that ‘democratising AI was important because it has the potential to change people’s lives’. It seemed to be universally accepted that this would be a positive change, but few concrete examples were explored.
Most South African’s access the digital world via a smartphone, so it makes sense that the way to get more South African’s up to speed with AI is to put it within their reach.
Honor said it was committed to bringing AI to more affordable devices and, according to Ntsubane, Vodacom was doing its part with its ‘EASY2OWN‘ initiative which allows customers to “Own a prepaid Smartphone from R6.50 per day.”
Progress can be slow
This is a good start. But it remains to be seen how Honor’s affordable devices, like its X-series, fare when other parts of the industry (we’re looking at you, Nvidia) cause the price of memory chips to soar, or how the affordable devices manage to keep up as newer, more powerful AI models are introduced.
Then there’s the cost of mobile data. As more people get access to AI via affordable devices, they’ll use more mobile data as their devices outsource AI processing to cloud-based data centres. Reducing the cost of data or making AI-related tasks data-free would be a great next step.
And what about digital literacy? Just because more people have access to more affordable devices doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll know how to use them effectively.
Progress is being made, kinda. During his Africa Tech Fest address, Communications Minister Solly Malatsi said that the number of first-time smartphone buyers in South Africa had increased by 16% since the 9% ad valorem tax on smartphones priced under R2,500 was scrapped in April this year.
Let’s hope the AI bubble doesn’t burst, causing the collapse of modern society, before all these grand plans come to fruition.
