Kenyan founder built legal-records tool on Chinese AI model for US$25,000, he says

Kenyan entrepreneur Sentai Simons built JibuDocs, a tool that turns paper legal records into searchable databases, on a Chinese AI model for roughly US$25,000, Xinhua reported from Nairobi on 15 October.

Simons tailored the tool with about 1 million legal files, and the US$25,000 covered development and maintenance. Using a commercial service such as Anthropic's Claude would have cost more than US$1 million, according to Simons. "It's absolutely the difference between having a business and not having a business," Simons said, as quoted by Xinhua.

Xinhua said in a report on 1 September that JibuDocs was developed by Simons and Daniele Pisani, and that Simons's team uses both DeepSeek and Qwen, the model family from the Chinese company Alibaba.

The 15 October report, a roundup of African developers using Chinese open-source models, gave two more cases. In Uganda, technologist Ernest Mwebaze, a former Google research scientist, built Sunflower, an AI system that gives farmers weather updates and agricultural advice in local languages. It now supports more than 30 Ugandan languages.

After testing Chinese and American models, Mwebaze chose Alibaba's Qwen, which he found more effective at handling Ugandan languages, less expensive and easier to customise with local data. In Nigeria, the insurance-claims and fraud-detection company Curacel has integrated GLM models from China's Zhipu AI alongside Western models, and found that the Chinese models delivered comparable results at lower cost for high-volume tasks.

Robert Lisinge, director of the Technology, Innovation, Connectivity and Infrastructure Division at the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, said, as quoted in the same Xinhua report, that Chinese open-source models have helped lower costs for African universities and research institutions. He said less than 1% of internet content is available in African languages.

Xinhua's 1 September report on Chinese AI in Kenya also quoted Michael Michie, founder and chief executive of EverseTech, an AI start-up focused on local GPU infrastructure and enterprise AI applications. "Most of my clients choose the Chinese one," Michie said, as quoted by Xinhua. He also said of the Chinese models: "They perform just as well, sometimes even better." Xinhua cited a New York Times analysis that found Chinese models made up roughly half of AI use on OpenRouter, a platform offering about 400 AI models, up from less than 25% a year earlier.

The nonprofit publication Rest of World reported on 16 October that Chinese open models can do some tasks 50% to 90% cheaper than the leading American frontier models. It said four Chinese models were among the top five on the OpenRouter leaderboard last week, and that LiveBench had shown the top Chinese models lagging their US rivals by just 3% on benchmark scores.

Graham Webster, a research scholar and editor-in-chief at the DigiChina Project at Stanford University, said at a Rest of World event in San Francisco that American open models from Meta, Nvidia and others do not come close in capability. "If you need relatively frontier capability, right now that's Chinese open models only," he said. He said US companies "just don't release" open models of comparable performance.

Kenya is one of the 29 founding members of the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization, Xinhua reported on 1 September. Representatives of the 29 countries signed the agreement establishing the organisation in Shanghai on 16 July, and 10 African countries are among the founding members, Xinhua said in its 15 October report.

A Kenyan team won a grand prize in the cloud computing category at the 10th Huawei ICT Competition global finals in June, Xinhua said. It also reported Huawei's statement that its ICT Academy programme has partnered with more than 250 Nigerian universities and trained over 100,000 Nigerian students and young professionals since 2018.

China's AI industry topped 1.2 trillion yuan (US$176.7 billion) in 2025, up 40% year on year, according to the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, as cited by Xinhua.