Technology
Google Search Trends Show Interests of Nigerians in Artificial Intelligence Grow
By Modupe Gbadeyanka
New search trends released by Google have revealed that Nigerians are more interested than ever in Artificial Intelligence (AI) as their interests grew by 100 per cent in 2022 from 2021.
According to Google search Trends, search interest in “artificial intelligence” reached a record high in 2022 in Nigeria and across the world, with top trending questions in Nigeria including “what is AI art”, “what is deep learning in artificial intelligence”, “how to become an AI engineer” and “when was artificial intelligence invented” – all of which have been searched 5,000 per cent more in 2022 than 2021.
Other searches included “what is artificial intelligence all about” (+370%), “is artificial intelligence a course” (+260%) and “what is artificial intelligence” (+130%).
Google, which views AI as a solution for addressing significant societal challenges like climate change, recently shared their approach to pursuing AI responsibly, which includes the need to prioritise building and testing for safety, and prioritising its purpose for the public good.
“It’s great to see people in Nigeria showing more of an interest in the transformational technology that is AI. AI is already a key part of many of our lives – in fact, if you use Google tools regularly, you’re probably using AI without even realising: it’s what helps Maps give you the fastest or most fuel-efficient route or Search to find what you’re looking for.
“We’re continuing to pursue AI boldly and responsibly – creating tools that improve the lives of as many people as possible,” the President of Google Europe, the Middle East and Africa, Matt Brittin, said.
The trends, released today, also show that people in Nigeria are increasingly interested in protecting their cybersecurity and online privacy.
In 2022, searches for “computer security” were the top form of security searched worldwide and in Nigeria, while “cybercrime” was searched at record levels globally. Nigerians frequently searched for cyber security – with “what is ethical hacking” increasing by over 5,000%, while searches for “what is cybersecurity” and “what is a virus in a computer” increased by 200% and 80%, respectively.
Google is using AI to address security challenges – including on Gmail, which automatically blocks more than 99.9% of malware, phishing and spam and protects more than 1.5 billion inboxes using AI.
With more people using the internet than ever before to manage every aspect of their daily lives, people in Nigeria are also interested in increasing their privacy online. Searches for “private browsing” surged in 2022, increasing by 70% – while Nigerians searched for “one-time passwords” more than any other country worldwide. Searches for “password manager”- a Google tool that makes it easy to use a strong, unique password for all of your online accounts – also reached a 10-year high in Nigeria.
People in Nigeria also turned to Google to help them better understand the economy, learn new skills and build their careers.
2022 was an uncertain year economically, reflected in the search trends.
Searches for inflation hit an all-time high worldwide and a 10-year high in Nigeria. Searches for “causes of cost-push inflation”, “creeping inflation” and “what is a recession” increased by over 5,000%. People also took to Google to understand the causes of rising prices and how to reduce them – with searches for “how to save heat”, “how to save water” and “how to save money” increasing by 370%, 80% and 22%, respectively.
People in Nigeria aren’t just turning to Google to understand these issues – they’re also looking for resources to navigate these challenges and build their careers. Searches for “how to learn coding” doubled, while searches for “how to learn video editing” (+450%), “how to learn web development” (+350%) and “how to learn photoshop” (+130%) also increased.
People also turned to Google to prepare for job interviews and find new opportunities: with search interest for the topic “job” increasing by 50%. Google itself continues to offer training and advice to those who need it most, having provided digital skills training to 22 million people across Europe, the Middle East and Africa since 2015 through their ‘Grow with Google’ programme.
People in Nigeria care about building a more sustainable future – and are using Google to understand how to do that.
The trends released today also show that people in Nigeria value environmentalism and sustainability. Across the world, searches for “climate change”, “climate crisis” and “sustainability” reached record highs – while in Nigeria, searches for “eco anxiety”, “greenwashing”, and “veganism” are at an all-time high.
Nigerians are also increasingly searching for “green energy”, “sustainable art” and “low emission vehicle” – all rising over 5,000% – as well as “renewable fuels” (+330%), “green growth” (+330%) and “solar fuel” (+240%).
Across the world, searches for environmental disasters were searched more than ever – including “drought”, “flood” and “landslides”, while in Nigeria “heat wave” has reached an all-time search high.
Google is no stranger to increased interest in sustainability – and, as well as working to achieve net zero emissions across all of its operations and value chain by 2030, is committed to enabling everyone to make more sustainable choices.
Over the last few years, Google has made changes to its core products, which reach billions of people each day, to help users make more sustainable choices.
Last year, Google released eco-friendly routing in Europe, which uses artificial intelligence to help show Google Maps users the most fuel and eco-efficient route, as well as the fastest.
The tool is already estimated to have saved more than half a million metric tons of carbon emissions – equivalent to taking 100,000 fuel-based cars off the road. Google also made changes to its Hotel, Flight and Shopping tools to help users see which options are most sustainable.
By Adedapo Adesanya
Lagos State’s representative, Team Nevo, won the 3 Million Technical Talent (3MTT) South-West Regional Hackathon, on Tuesday, December 9, 2025.
The host state took the victory defeating pitches from other south west states, including Oyo, Ogun, Osun, Ekiti, and Ondo States.
This regional hackathon was a major moment for the 3MTT Programme, bringing together young innovators from across the South-West to showcase practical solutions in AI, software development, cybersecurity, data analysis, and other key areas of Nigeria’s digital future.
Launched by the Federal Ministry of Communications, Innovation, and Digital Economy, the hackathon brought together talented young innovators from across the Southwest region to showcase their digital solutions in areas such as Artificial Intelligence (AI)/Machine Learning, software development, data analysis, and cybersecurity, among others.
“This event not only highlights the potential of youth in South West but also advances the digital economy, fosters innovation, and creates job opportunities for our young people,” said Mr Oluwaseyi Ayodele, the Lagos State Community Manager.
Winning the hackaton was Team Nevo, made up of Miss Lydia Solomon and Mr Teslim Sadiq, whose inclusive AI learning tool which tailors academic learning experiences to skill sets of students got the top nod, with N500,000 in prize money.
Team Oyo represented by Microbiz, an AI business tool solution, came in second place winning N300,000 while Team Ondo’s Fincoach, a tool that guides individuals and businesses in marking smarter financial decisions, came third with N200,000 in prize money.
Others include The Frontiers (Team Osun), Ecocycle (Team Ogun), and Mindbud (Team Ekiti).
Speaking to Business Post, the lead pitcher for Team Nevo, Miss Solomon, noted, “It was a very lovely experience and the opportunity and access that we got was one of a kind,” adding that, “Expect the ‘Nevolution’ as we call it, expect the transformation of the educational sector and how Nevo is going to bring inclusion and a deeper level of understanding and learning to schools all around Nigeria.”
Earlier, during his keynote speech, the chief executive officer (CEO) of Sterling Bank, Mr Abubakar Suleiman, emphasised the need for Nigeria’s budding youth population to tap into the country’s best comparative advantage, drawing parallels with commodities and resources like cocoa, soyabeans, and uranium.
“Tech is our best bet to architect a comparative advantage. The work we are doing with technologies are very vital to levelling the playing field.”
By Aduragbemi Omiyale
One of the high points of the 2025 re:Invent was the unveiling of Graviton5, the fifth generation of custom Arm-based server processors from Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Many tech enthusiasts believe that the company pushed the limits with Graviton5, its most powerful and efficient CPU, frontier agents that can work autonomously for days, an expansion of the Amazon Nova model family, Trainium3 UltraServers, and AWS AI Factories suitable for implementing AI infrastructure in customers’ existing data centres.
Graviton5—the company’s most powerful and efficient CPU
As cloud workloads grow in complexity, organizations face a persistent challenge to deliver faster performance at lower costs and meet sustainability commitments without trade-offs.
AWS’ new Graviton5-based Amazon EC2 M9g delivers up to 25% higher performance than its previous generation, with 192 cores per chip and 5x larger cache.
For the third year in a row, more than half of new CPU capacity added to AWS is powered by Graviton, with 98 per cent of the top 1,000 EC2 customers—including Adobe, Airbnb, Epic Games, Formula 1, Pinterest, SAP, and Siemens—already benefiting from Graviton’s price performance advantages.
Expansion of Nova family of models and pioneers “open training” with Nova Forge
Amazon is expanding its Nova portfolio with four new models that deliver industry-leading price-performance across reasoning, multimodal processing, conversational AI, code generation, and agentic tasks. Nova Forge pioneers “open training,” giving organizations access to pre-trained model checkpoints and the ability to blend proprietary data with Amazon Nova-curated datasets.
Nova Act achieves breakthrough 90% reliability for browser-based UI automation workflows built by early customers. Companies like Reddit are using Nova Forge to replace multiple specialized models with a single solution, while Hertz accelerated development velocity by 5x with Nova Act.
Addition of 3 frontier agents, a new class of AI agents that work as an extension of your software development team
Frontier agents represent a step-change in what agents can do. They’re autonomous, scalable, and can work for hours or days without intervention. AWS announced three frontier agents—Kiro autonomous agent, AWS Security Agent, and AWS DevOps Agent. Kiro autonomous agent acts as a virtual developer for your team, AWS Security Agent is your own security consultant, and AWS DevOps Agent is your on-call operational team.
Companies, including Commonwealth Bank of Australia, SmugMug, and Wester Governors University have used one or more of these agents to transform the software development lifecycle.
Unveiling Trainium3 UltraServers
As AI models grow in size and complexity, training cutting-edge models requires infrastructure investments that only a handful of organizations can afford.
Amazon EC2 Trn3 UltraServers, powered by AWS’s first 3nm AI chip, pack up to 144 Trainium3 chips into a single integrated system, delivering up to 4.4x more compute performance and 4x greater energy efficiency than Trainium2 UltraServers.
Customers achieve 3x higher throughput per chip while delivering 4x faster response times, reducing training times from months to weeks. Customers including Anthropic, Karakuri, Metagenomi, NetoAI, Ricoh, and Splash Music are reducing training and inference costs by up to 50 per cent with Trainium, while Decart is achieving 4x faster inference for real-time generative video at half the cost of GPUs, and Amazon Bedrock is already serving production workloads on Trainium3.
By Adedapo Adesanya
The National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) has issued an advisory on new vulnerabilities in ChatGPT that could expose users to data-leakage attacks.
According to the advisory, researchers discovered seven vulnerabilities affecting GPT-4o and GPT-5 models that allow attackers to manipulate ChatGPT through indirect prompt injection.
The agency explained that hidden instructions placed inside webpages, comments, or Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) can trigger unintended commands during regular browsing, summarisation, or search actions.
“By embedding hidden instructions in webpages, comments, or crafted URLs, attackers can cause ChatGPT to execute unintended commands simply through normal browsing, summarization, or search actions,” they stated.
The warning followed rising concerns about AI-powered tools interacting with unsafe web content and the growing dependence on ChatGPT for business, research, and public-sector tasks.
NITDA added that some flaws allow the bypassing of safety controls by masking malicious content behind trusted domains.
Other weaknesses take advantage of markdown rendering bugs, enabling hidden instructions to pass undetected.
It explained that in severe cases, attackers can poison ChatGPT’s memory, forcing the system to retain malicious instructions that influence future conversations
They stated that while OpenAI has fixed parts of the issue, Large-Language Models (LLMs) still struggle to reliably separate genuine user intent from malicious data.
The Agency warned that these vulnerabilities could lead to a range of cybersecurity threats, including unauthorised actions carried out by the model; unintended exposure of user information; manipulated or misleading outputs; and long-term behavioural changes caused by memory poisoning, among others.
It advised Nigerians, businesses, and government institutions to adopt several precautionary steps to stay safe. These include limiting or disabling the browsing and summarisation of untrusted websites within enterprise environments and enabling features like browsing or memory only when necessary.
It also recommended regular updates to deployed GPT-4o and GPT-5 models to ensure known vulnerabilities are patched.
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