denzelchingodza/muzezuru

A Shona speaking conversational AI, fine tuned on BLOOMZ via QLoRA # Muzezuru A conversational AI model fine tuned to understand and respond fluently in Shona, the primary language of Zimbabwe. Built from scratch on free tier compute, with no budget and no prior large scale model training experience. Named after the Zezuru, one of the main Shona sub groups, centered around Harare and Mashonaland. Standard written Shona is itself based largely on the Zezuru dialect. Status: in active development. This is not a finished product. See Limitations and Progress below for exactly where things stand and why. ## Why this project exists Shona is a low resource language. Large models like GPT4, Claude, and Gemini have very limited Shona ability because there is very little Shona text in their training data compared to English, French, Spanish, or even Swahili. This leaves millions of Shona speakers effectively locked out of modern AI tools unless they switch to a second language. Beyond that, this project is a technical exploration of a genuinely hard problem. How do you fine tune a capable base model on a language it barely knows, with limited data and zero budget? The honest answer is that you can, but only partly, and understanding exactly what you can and can't fix this way is the real lesson of this project. ## Limitations, and why they exist Muzezuru hallucinates. It sometimes gives fluent, confident answers in Shona that are simply wrong, especially for factual questions like Zimbabwean geography, currency, or specific instructions. This is a known, tested, and expected limitation, not a bug that slipped through. Here is why it happens. **The base model never learned many Shona facts in the first place.** BLOOMZ, the model this project fine tunes, was trained on many languages including Shona, but the amount of Shona text it saw was still small compared to English. It picked up grammar and general fluency, but it never had much chance to learn specific facts stated in Shona, such as the name of Zimbabwe's capital city or its c …