Kainene vos Savant was Justin Irabor’s personal study partner. Named after one of America’s cleverest people, Kainene is off-the-charts clever. But she is no regular study partner. She’s a super-intelligent chatbot. And she’s taking the Nigerian internet by storm.
After enrolling as a distance learning student at the International University of Applied Sciences in Germany, Justin Irabor quickly realised he needed help managing work and school. It wasn’t easy to balance the duties of a professional web developer and a data science student.
“My master’s programme is online, and the challenge with that is that you need a study partner, otherwise you’re never quite sure how much of the study material you’ve consumed. This was quite challenging because combining daily activities with school meant you have to synchronise with a lot of people. Sometimes I’m at work and my study partner is also at work. It created conflicting timelines,” said Irabor.
I liked Vos Savant and picked that as a last name for my AI chatbot. And Kainene is a name I have loved for a very long time. Besides that, AI is within the spelling of Kainene. It’s fitting,” he said.
While developing his study partner, Irabor began sharing his experiences on Twitter. This quickly built public attention, and many of his followers asked for access to the AI chatbot. Now, Kainene has thousands of users on Telegram who rely on it for daily tasks and prompt information.
Interest has grown exponentially after the launch of Open AI’s ChatGPT in November 2022. People are seeing the merits of artificial intelligence and how it helps in various industries, according to Irabor.
Conversational AI is the next generation of customer and employee interactions, according to a 2019 Deloitte report. “Early benefits from the adoption of conversational AI mean that the global AI-derived business value is expected to grow by an average of 30% annually and become a market size of $22.6 billion at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 30.2% by 2024,” the report stated.
Due to the positive feedback from his Twitter followers, Irabor began retraining his AI for general usage, allowing it to be further tailored to each individual’s use case.
“At the time, Kainene was bound to my process because I’d been training her on my textbooks. The particular AI model I was working with then could only really discuss with you what I was learning. Interestingly, that was when Open AI launched GPT4, so I could upgrade the model, different from the one Chat GPT uses, which gave Kainene an intelligence boost.
“I also wrote some logic with many servers set up in the backend, which takes the model and binds it to each individual. This means even though I’m using one model, different people can interact with Kainene, having separate conversations. There’s some persistence and logic in the back end to make that happen,” he explained.
From that moment, it took less than two months to build Kainene vos Savant to what it is known today. By March, the AI chatbot was ready to be released to the public after some rounds of beta testing.
Eventually, what began as a pet project became a much-loved AI chatbot, with over a thousand users joining in on its launch day, 23 March.
Several users have compared Kainene vos Savant to ChatGPT, stating that its user interface and experience are preferable. Some are intrigued by the show of personality, which they find relatable. Others are glad it can help lighten their workload.