Comparing AI models: the landscape explained: a clear, fact-based explanation for South African organisations — with osFoundry as an example and dgm as an independent partner.

dgm is an independent integration partner for osFoundry — it is not affiliated with osFoundry’s maker (OS LLC) and has not yet completed an integration project for any client.

The AI model landscape is broad: closed models, open models and local-language models. Here is how to compare them.

Types of model

  • Closed models (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google) — strong, via API.
  • Open models (Mistral, Llama) — self-hostable.
  • Local-language models — open-weight efforts for South Africa’s languages, as a model layer.

What this means for your business

South Africa has no major national large language model. The most visible local effort is Lelapa AI’s InkubaLM, a small open-weight model for African languages such as isiZulu, isiXhosa, Swahili, Hausa and Yoruba — but it is published under a CC BY-NC 4.0 licence, which is non-commercial, so it suits research and experimentation rather than a commercial deployment. Supporting initiatives such as SADiLaR (the South African Centre for Digital Language Resources) and the Masakhane community build datasets and tools rather than deployable models. For commercial self-hosting, the realistic open-weight choices are Mistral (Apache-2.0) and Llama (open-weight), which run under osFoundry through BYOK or on your own infrastructure. Because osFoundry is model-agnostic, you can compose any of these as a model layer beneath the platform; that is orchestration, not a head-to-head contest between two platforms.

You can explore the osFoundry platform to learn more.

Where dgm comes in

dgm is an independent integration partner that helps organisations in South Africa adopt the osFoundry platform — from identifying the first practical use case, to setting it up, to connecting AI to the systems you already run. dgm operates separately from osFoundry’s maker (OS LLC) and has not yet completed an integration project for any client, so everything above is a proposed service rather than a delivered outcome. If you would like to weigh up a practical first step, dgm would be glad to think it through with you. Arrange an introductory call with dgm.