Applications have opened for the 2026 NITDA National AI Innovation Challenge, an initiative focused on advancing the technical development, adoption and practical use of Nigeria’s sovereign artificial intelligence capabilities. Central to the challenge is N-ATLAS (Nigerian Atlas for Languages and AI at Scale), an open-source multilingual large language model developed for Nigerian use. Fine-tuned from Llama-3 8B, N-ATLAS supports Yoruba, Hausa, Igbo and Nigerian-accented English, including Automatic Speech Recognition for voice applications. The challenge is inviting Nigerian innovators to develop developer tools, voice-first applications and sector-specific AI solutions using N-ATLAS. The initiative...