Okechukwu Nwaozor had to pardon my chuckle when he told me he wanted to build his own AI system. The disbelief was natural: he is a first-time founder, fresh out of secondary school, just seventeen, and a completely self-taught developer.
I chuckled again when he mentioned he’d raised ₦2.7 million to do this. But on a call with Techpoint Africa, Nwaozor made it clear he understood how unbelievable his ambitions sounded.
He’s been laughed at before. When he first announced on Facebook that he was building his own AI product, the comments ranged from disbelief to outright mockery. “People told me it couldn’t be done,” he recalls.
The doubt didn’t stop him. As unbelievable as it seems for a 17-year-old Nigerian to build an AI system, Nwaozor simply kept building, and he came up with OkeyMeta, his very own AI company.
Building a hybrid AI model
When Saheed Azeez built NaijaWeb in 2024, he gave a glimpse into what it takes to train an AI model. It involved collecting datasets, cleaning them, preprocessing them, and then training a model long enough for it to learn meaningful patterns.
Even that process is difficult. But building a large language model (LLM) is an entirely different level of complexity.
Big AI labs such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google train their models on trillions of words, using thousands of GPUs, and budgets that stretch into hundreds of millions of dollars.
Thanks to open-source datasets and public research, a determined developer can now build hybrid AI models without Silicon Valley-level resources.
In Nwaozor’s case, he fine-tuned smaller open-source models like Google’s Gemma-2B, adapting them with African-focused datasets he gathered and cleaned himself.
On top of this foundation, he created custom reasoning systems and used knowledge distillation techniques, comparing outputs from different AI models to improve performance. He also created the training pipelines, interface, and API that developers can use.
For a 17-year-old self-taught developer, the technical achievement is significant: fine-tuning open-source models, building knowledge distillation pipelines, and creating custom reasoning layers, and deploying a working product with API access, all on a shoestring budget.
The inspiration for OkeyMeta
You would expect Nwaozor’s motivation to come from the global frenzy around ChatGPT, but that wasn’t the spark. His fascination began much earlier with Google.
“I kept wondering how Google instantly gives you so many relevant results,” he says. That curiosity pulled him down a rabbit hole, one that led him to AI long before he ever imagined building his own model.
In a Facebook developer group, he saw people creating AI bots that could join conversations and respond like real humans. “It blew my mind,” he recalls.
That curiosity hardened into ambition in 2022. “I started by gathering data, which I used to train version one,” he said. “Later, I figured out how to get free data from open-source sites, and that helped me build version 2.0-basic.”
Like Chimdi of ChatATP, Nwaozor is a die-hard Mark Zuckerberg fan. So naturally, one of the first things he tried to build was a social media platform. Like every self-taught developer, he dabbled in many small projects, but OkeyMeta became the one he couldn’t let go of his holy grail.
He eventually registered the company as OkeyMeta — a blend of his name and Zuckerberg’s Meta.
“To me, it means Okechukwu, go beyond the current state because ‘meta’ in tech means to transcend,” he explains.
And he has been trying to transcend for three years now. Which means that at just 14 years old, he had already chosen this path and began pursuing it relentlessly. Despite his age, he pulled together a small team of undergraduates who helped him push the model to where it is today.
The future of OkeyMeta
L-R – Woleola Abdullateef, Nwaozor Okechukwu, Raji Abdulazeem, Adeleke Uthman
OkeyMeta’s chatbot, OkeyAI, has about 900 users signed up, while about 4,000 active developers use its APIs. Despite these, Nwaozor believes visibility is still low.
“Our posts only get one or two likes,” he almost whispered. This is why he’s focused on growing user numbers rather than making money.
“All the developers are using it for free. It is important for us to create awareness first,” he explained. Free access is part of his strategy to drive adoption, but he also believes the platform already has features that give it an edge over big players.
For example, they’ve built clever agent-based features that allow the model to take actions only when specific conditions are met. For example, replying to an email only after the sender expresses interest in buying a product.
But growth is a double-edged sword.
It costs about $100 per month to keep OkeyMeta running, so more users means higher compute costs, which the team simply cannot afford right now.
Nwaozor knows his ₦2.7 million in funding will soon run out. He has received some investor interest, but not enough, and some of it, he said, came with terms that would harm him long-term. Raising the right kind of capital is now a matter of survival.
Still, his conviction remains unshaken.
OkeyMeta is tiny and probably does not have much going for it by the way of competitive advantage, but it it represents an impressive homegrown AI system built by a teenager in Nigeria, demonstrating what’s possible with determination and resourcefulness.
To go further, he will need more than passion and code. He will need capital, mentorship, infrastructure, and the kind of guidance required to run a company at the scale he dreams about.
Editor’s note: 10:11 am (WAT) – The headline of this article has been modified to reflect the true nature of the task the subject is embarking on.
Editor’s note: 3:50 pm (WAT) – The article has been modified to reflect that Nwaozor has built an AI model, and not an LLM.
Editor’s note: This article has been updated to show that OkeyMeta is a hybrid AI system built on open-source models like Google’s Gemma-2B, adapting them with African-focused datasets.
