Kenya's Richard Mathenge makes Time Magazine's list of 100 most influential people in AI

Richard Mathenge, the organiser of the recently formed African Content Moderators Union, has made Time Magazine’s first list of the world’s top innovators in artificial intelligence (AI).

The 38-year-old Mathenge was recognised by the American magazine for his work in advancing AI’s influence across the world, alongside heavy hitters such as the OpenAI founder Sam Altman.

Mathenge was among the Kenyan content moderators sourced to train OpenAI’s popular chatbot ChatGPT ahead of its launch in November last year.

The team was sourced by OpenAI’s local moderation partner Sama and spent months reading and classifying toxic material such as hate speech, racism, violence, and descriptions of sexual abuse.

Later, the moderators went public about the poor working conditions they were exposed to, including exploitation and underpayment.

Then in May, over 150 moderators voted to establish a one-of-a-kind workers' union dubbed the Content Moderators Union drawing moderators from ChatGPT, Facebook and TikTok, as well as any other tech firm.

Mathenge went public as among those who voted to unionise.

Most recently in July, he and three other former ChatGPT moderators filed a petition in Parliament seeking a probe into OpenAI and Sama, calling upon the Kenyan government to investigate the companies and regulate the work of tech companies operating in the country.

“We were dealing with serious trauma... It was our obligation to reach out to Parliament,” Mathenge tells Time, adding that the human workers behind AI “are being treated as trash.”

In the list released Thursday, the magazine praises Mathenge for championing the human labour that makes large language models safer to use.

Another name on the list is Kate Kallot, the French founder of Kenya-based climate tech start-up Amini.

Kallot, 32, founded the start-up in December last year and they use artificial intelligence and satellite technology to create data infrastructure and address the continent’s scarcity of climate data.

Amini’s platform aggregates data from satellites, weather data, sensors and proprietary customer data down to a square meter. It unifies and processes the data and then provides it to local and international companies via an application programming interface (API).

This gives farmers data on the cycle between crop planting and harvesting, the amount of water and fertilizer used, as well as analytics on drought, floods, soil and crop health.

The start-up closed a Ksh.292 million ($2 million) pre-seed funding round in May.