GOT THE SMARTS

JOSEPH LUMBAHE IS CARVING OUT A REPUTATION IN SA’S TECH INDUSTRY

- LINDSEY SCHUTTERS

NOT CONTENT WITH HIS BASIC DEGREE IN COMPUTER SCIENCE, Joseph Lumbahe went on to complete a master's degree in financial engineering and is now working on a second master's degree, in computer science. He also holds certificates from international engineering and artificial-intelligence organisations. And more recently, he has been elected to the science committee of South Africa's Institute of IT Professionals.

If all that sounds exhausting, Joseph also holds down a pretty complicated day job, working as a manager and lead engineer for the Aizatron Group, where he specialises in Computer Vision and fraud detection for one of SA's major cellular networks. Here, artificial intelligence overtook his other tech interests and established him as a leader in this field in South Africa.

But the most interesting developments have been in Joseph's entrepreneurial ventures, where his transport platform, Bus54, has attracted lots of attention, as well as the industry support needed to bring it to market.

Will artificial intelligence be more popular than 5G or blockchain?

I'm not going to say we're reaching a full level of cognitive computing, but what we're experiencing now with ChatGPT is getting very close. People are interacting with an Al language model and getting practical responses that it is drawing from its data parameters.

The language model behind ChatGPT is called GPT3 and is developed by OpenAI using a couple of billion parameters. GPT4 is currently training on trillions of parameters. Just from that perspective, it's going to be far superior to what we have now.