The Download: digital hide-and-seek, and AI for African languages

It's not a typical hide-and-seek game, though, but rather one for the digital age: both the seekers and the hiders chase and evade each other by following their real-time locations on a map on their phones.Our reporter Zeyi Yang played a game with 40 strangers in a seven-acre park built on the site of the infamous Kowloon Walled City. Inside a co-working space in the Rosebank neighborhood of Johannesburg, Jade Abbott popped open a tab on her computer and prompted ChatGPT to count from 1 to 10 in isiZulu, a language spoken by more than 10 million people in her native South Africa. The results were "mixed and hilarious," says Abbott, a computer scientist and researcher. Then she typed in a few sentences in isiZulu and asked the chatbot to translate them into English. Abbott's experience mirrors the situation faced by Africans who don't speak English.