Five years into AI Sweden’s existence we can proudly say that it has been a tremendous journey together with our partners.
Along with the significant breakthroughs in generative AI and the skyrocketing interest, it has become clear to business, organisations and countries that focus has to be on applying AI here and now.
AI Sweden’s mission to accelerate the use of AI for the benefit of our society, our competitiveness, and for everyone living in Sweden, has never been more relevant and we look forward to seeing AI Sweden partners and others taking big leaps toward becoming AI-driven and moving from pilots to operations.
The power of AI Sweden’s partner network is visible in everything from the open release of the first large Nordic language model, GPT-SW3, to innovative projects in healthcare, energy, and public sector implementation. As a result of these shared investments, crucial national resources are developed and - importantly - used in real-life situations across the country.
Together, we are building a robust and highly attractive Swedish AI ecosystem propelling organizations to use AI for solving key societal and business challenges. Do not hesitate to get in touch if you have ideas for how AI Sweden and partners should continue to engage in critical initiatives and collaborations!
“AI Sweden is a good example of an actor that, to a very large extent, mobilizes, initiates, and brings together collaborations that break new ground.”
Darja Isaksson
Director general of Vinnova
“We are very happy with the work that you do every day and the good cooperation that we have. I look forward to continuing this fruitful collaboration.”
Erik Slottner
Minister of Public Administration
2023 marked an increased focus on public-private collaboration highlighting for example the supplier focus and internationalisation in the healthcare sector initiatives.
Broad knowledge sharing during a 100-person conference that served as a neutral platform for industry and public stakeholders to collaborate. This was also the starting point for a new network for data scientists in healthcare.
AI Sweden × Unity Health Toronto
A letter of intent was signed with Unity Health Toronto – a leading healthcare organisation with over 50 data analytics and AI solutions already deployed.
The collaboration between Unity Health Toronto and AI Sweden promises to bring these significant Canadian insights to the Swedish healthcare system.
Information-driven healthcare
Region Halland, Sahlgrenska University Hospital, Karolinska University Hospital, Region Örebro Län, Region Västerbotten, Örebro University, and Halmstad University are working together to accelerate the implementation of information-driven healthcare and AI, funded by Vinnova and participating regions. 4 years into this collaboration, the initiative serves as a unified voice as well as a platform for new collaborations and knowledge sharing.
“As a project partner, in addition to a valuable network, we have also gained greater legitimacy in the work with information-driven healthcare.”
Lina Lorenzon
Region Västmanland
"The network has given us the opportunity to meet others who are either facing similar challenges or who make us raise our sights and realize that we need to focus on new issues." Petra Svedberg, Halmstad University"
Petra Svedberg
Halmstad University
"AI Sweden helps the innovation environment to raise its sights and has a longer time perspective in its planning."
Anders Norén
Karolinska
"The AI Sweden collaboration has shown that together we can be a unified voice and a greater force in the work towards more information-driven healthcare."
Sebastian Backman
Region Västerbotten
Reach out to Nina Lahti or Lorna Bartram.
A four-year joint effort with Vinnova to tailor support and resources for Sweden's 290 municipalities and numerous non-profit organisations to use AI.
Atea, Microsoft, and AI Sweden invited Swedish municipalities to a hackathon. 30 municipalities attended and together developed close to 600 ideas on how they could use AI. Several are now in active development, such as a support solution for personnel in elderly care services.
Other examples of concrete use cases for municipalities within more efficient administration and community planning.
The AI council for municipalities is led by AI Sweden and SKR with representatives from 12 municipalities who met seven times over the year and discussed high-level strategic recommendations on how to accelerate the use of AI in Swedish municipalities.
“The AI Council is an important initiative for Sweden's municipalities. We hope that we can set a common direction for the strategic work with AI in municipal Sweden and create opportunities for all municipalities, large and small, to fully utilize the possibilities of artificial intelligence.”
Katarina Lagerqvist
Chief Digital Officer, Kristinehamns kommun
“We are now seriously beginning to see the potential of AI to contribute to the development of welfare services, while there is a need to identify the conditions that need to be in place and the risks that need to be managed to increase Sweden's capacity for a sustainable transition. The way forward is together in broad collaboration between the public sector, business, and academia. With the AI Council, an important piece of the puzzle is in place.”
Ola Odebäck
Head of Finance and Control, SKR
Reach out to Rebecka Lönnroth.
A changing energy and electricity landscape in Sweden calls for new ways of forecasting our future energy needs and a better understanding of consumption.
AI Sweden has together with partners created Behovskartan, which is an interactive tool where users can tweak settings related to electricity needs, technological advances, climate changes, and other factors. The aim is to foster an understanding of electricity production and consumption from local to national levels.
Reach out to Filip Kjellgren.
During 2023, AI Sweden supported partners by conducting AI maturity assessments. With the support of one of the talent program participants, the Swedish Police Authority performed a successful assessment across their entire National Forensics Centre.
“It was very well received and formed a vital step in our AI journey”, said Anders Åström, Business developer and AI coordinator.
After conducting a maturity assessment, several partners set objectives and systematically worked on adopting AI across their organizations. Region Västra Götaland credits this process with taking real steps in maturity, recruiting specific AI expertise, formulating an AI strategy to launch in 2024, and working hands-on with valuable use cases.
“The survey provides a concrete and clear checklist of what we need to do. Conducting regular assessments of maturity will make it easier for us to prioritize the right actions with the greatest impact.“
Johan Åhlén
Region Skåne
“Without our collaboration with AI Sweden, it would have taken us longer to get to the point where we are today.”
Maria Vikingsson
Region Västra Götaland
Reach out to Johanna Bergman or Conny Svensson.
‘AI for Executives’ is a six-day program for leaders developed by the executive education units at Gothenburg University, Stockholm University, and Uppsala University in collaboration with AI Sweden.
"With a lack of technology literacy at senior level, in all sectors, it's imperative that leaders recognize the implications of strategic non-engagement - for both their organizations and Swedish national competitiveness. With the advice and ongoing support of AI Sweden the executive education businesses of Sweden's three largest universities have been able to deliver a program of the highest quality, with an impressive array of AI thought-leaders as speakers, to organizations that are desperate to keep to move along the AI adoption curve."
Dr. Ian Richardson, Director of Executive Education, SBS, Stockholm University
Reach out to Raquel Broman.
For example in Örebro, four talents explored federated and fleet learning on a large open dataset from Zenseact and were then offered part-time contracts. Several of the participants in talent programs were offered positions with partners such as the Swedish Police Authority and HPE.
During the summer of 2023, and as a direct response to the increased demand to better understand of generative AI, eight students joined partners Zenseact, Chalmers, and Region Västra Götaland to accelerate their implementation of the technology, using compute sponsored by Microsoft. This generated substantial value for the participating partners.
“Participating in the GPT internship program has definitely helped us with our evaluation of where and how we can implement large-scale language models within healthcare. This provides us with a good foundation for our continued work.”
Isak Barbopoulos, Machine Learning Specialist at Region Västra Götaland
“Eye for AI was a catalyst that immersed me in real-world AI applications in different domains and enriched my journey with invaluable experience and exposure. The various projects at different organizations not only paved the way to my current position at AstraZeneca but also expanded my network, helping me discover the facets of AI that truly ignite my passion and charting a clear course for my professional journey.“
Sandra Carrasco
Participant Eye for AI
“Artificial intelligence provides great potential, but there is a shortage of skilled people. The NLU program constitutes an important initiative for Vinnova as it provides access to AI talent while at the same time making Sweden more attractive and growing the talent pool.”
Daniel Rencrantz
Director, Head of division at Vinnova
"Thanks to our AI talents, we have gained a greater understanding of language models in our organization and the ability to more quickly get started with a larger project"
Rosita Ahlstedt
Head of Decision support and AI, Region Halland
Reach out to Sofia Hedén.
Organizations across Sweden led study circles based on the Start Your AI Journey educational material developed by AI Sweden. This enabled partners such as the Swedish Police Authority and the City of Gothenburg and many more to develop valuable use cases.
“The city of Gothenburg faces a big AI competence challenge. The study circle using “Start your AI journey” has played a significant role in addressing this, partly through guidance and materials, and we have developed an education plan.”
Maria Eriksson Söderström, Communication and digital competence development manager, Gothenburg city.
Reach out to Raquel Boman.
AI Sweden and collaborating organizations HighFive Innovationsarena, IUC Sjuhärad, Skövde Science Park, and Innovatum have concluded a pilot project aiming to help small and medium-sized businesses in western Sweden.
AI Sweden and its partners push the boundaries in the field of applied artificial intelligence and build a strong applied research environment in Sweden.
The first large Nordic language model, GPT-SW3, was released as open source in November 2023 contributing to the growing flora of open-source models in Europe. The large models are downloaded 2000-3000 times on average per month and the smaller model around 33 000. The GPT-SW3 models are available at Hugging Face.
An interdisciplinary expert pool of social science researchers has worked hands-on with stress-prompting GPT-SW3 to evaluate behavior in terms of swearing, hate speech, and misogyny. As a result, the researchers have also gained knowledge about LLMs and prompting specifically for the Swedish language.
Together with Intel, AI Sweden is working on an inference infrastructure to enable deployment of GPT-SW3 making it easier for organizations to host the model on their infrastructure, thus locally.
The Data Readiness Lab provides a collaborative environment and contributes skills, tools, frameworks, and resources to increase data readiness and data maturity among actors in both the public and private sectors. This has resulted in concrete checklists and guides for increasing the organisations' AI readiness used by for example municipalities.
During the year, four researchers have worked as an extended part of the AI Sweden talent program team together with Region Halland and Vinnova. Both participating organizations report an accelerated adoption of language models.
Sweden is taking a leading role in the development of open-source large-scale AI models in Europe with two new EU-projects. Moreover, the focus going forward is on developing the first major multimodal language model in and for Sweden. Like GPT-SW3, this new model will serve as a new national resource for Sweden.
Reach out to Magnus Sahlgren.
AI Sweden and partners work with a wide range of privacy-preserving techniques. A unique component in this is the Edge Learning Lab that provided cutting-edge solutions for partners in the health, automotive, finance, and space industry (so far).
The European Space Agency (ESA) and AI Sweden have developed a Python module (PASEOS) to simulate the environment to operate multiple spacecraft.
In collaboration with Unibap, AI Sweden is exploring the capability of AI on board of satellites. and requirements for hardware, data storage and deployment, training, and inference of AI models in orbit. As a next step, a library of applications will be tested first in the Edge Learning Lab and then on board.
Together with Volvo Cars and Zenseact, AI Sweden is using federated learning techniques to leverage an entire car fleet to develop better models faster without data transfer. This is currently being deployed in real-life cars.
Reach out to Johan Östman.
Building secure AI models that are robust towards malicious attacks is an important technical and legal challenge for many organizations and the focus of the AI Security Lab at AI Sweden.
LeakPro, a new project with RISE, AstraZeneca, Sahlgrenska, Region Halland, Scaleout, and Syndata, was launched in 2023 aiming to foster a grounded discussion on information leakage, bridge legal and technical risks and give deep insights around weaknesses in trained models and their data.
Madison Cyber Labs at Dakota State University (DSU) and AI Sweden host an annual
student exchange program, in 2023 the program was doubled compared to last year to 12 students in total
For the first time, Swedish banks are collaborating on a project around anti-money laundering in a project led by AI Sweden. The project resulted in a motor for generating and validating synthetic transaction data, as today there are no open data sets for anti-money laundering. The results are directly useful since they take into account aspects such as noisy data, transactions with cash money, and imbalance in the training data.
Reach out to Mats Nordlund.
The Data Factory infrastructure and knowledge environment allow partners from all sectors to use state-of-the-art infrastructure and benefit from collaboration and interaction with AI Sweden’s technical, strategic, and legal experts. This has resulted in several valuable projects and collaborations.
Partners ATEA, the Swedish Tax Agency, and Red Hat have evaluated Red Hat Open Shift Data Science which has increased the knowledge of how the tax agency should build their environments. Collaborating openly through AI Sweden was key for this to happen.
During the year, several initiatives towards open-source solutions have been spearheaded by cross-sector collaboration in the data factory. NetAPP and HPE have both taken steps to use open-source virtualization environments in their applications. Organizations such as Region Västra Götaland and the City of Helsingborg have decided to share results as open source.
“When it comes to AI projects, you want to make sure that they scale. You want to test close by where you are, where you have people and equipment. Then you want to distribute that maybe globally to all the other environments that you have. That is one of the biggest winning themes of being here at the Edge Learning Lab.”
Marie Eriksson Johansson
Solution Architect, Dell Technologies
“As a startup, developing tools for ‘edge learning’, specifically federated learning, having an infrastructure like the Edge Lab is invaluable. It is somewhere we can test our software in real production-like environments and collaborate with some of the best enterprises in Sweden on this.”
Andreas Hellander
CEO and co-founder, Scaleout Systems AB
Reach out to Helena Theander or Mats Nordlund.
AI Sweden together with its partners works towards a robust and highly attractive Swedish AI ecosystem on all levels where AI is used for solving key societal and business challenges.
2023 was marked by increased interest from public policymakers, which resulted in high-level and high-frequency contact with the government, sharing knowledge, proposals, and ecosystem guidance. This includes a visit to Canada to learn from their strategic work and investments in AI.
Moreover, the Swedish government formed an AI commission and appointed AI Sweden’s Managing Director Martin Svensson as one of its members.
Listen to AI Sweden's Martin Svensson, Managing Director, and Mikael Ljungblom, Director of Public Policy and International Relations, as they speak during the Transportation Committee's open hearing on AI. The clip is in Swedish.
Skip to 00:18:10 for Martin and to 01:32:30 for Mikael.
Watch the clip on SVT
Notably, and in addition to collaborations with many international stakeholders, AI Sweden has had an increased presence in the Canadian AI ecosystem during 2023. This resulted in strong collaboration with CIFAR, visits and exchanges from Swedish researchers and industry to Mila, participation in a delegation with top-level government leadership, and concrete healthcare collaboration with Unity Health Toronto.
On a European level, the close collaboration with European peers has allowed us to gather and disseminate knowledge about generative AI in the European AI startup ecosystem. Culminating in a report being presented in Davos. Swedish startups contributed with 33% of the answers.
Leaders at all levels are engaged through AI Sweden’s networks, site visits, and knowledge exchange opportunities.
25 executives were participating in the Executive AI Accelerator to identify and discuss joint challenges. The meetings in 2023 were hosted by CEVT, NetApp, Intel, and AstraZeneca and covered topics such as AI trends, foundation models, security, and scaling AI successes in Sweden.
With the objective to foster and accelerate AI in Europe, the appliedAI Institute for Europe, Hub France IA, Ignite Sweden, AI Sweden, RISE, and the Netherlands AI Coalition came together in early 2020 to start the initial steps in mapping the AI startup ecosystem in Europe. In 2023, 198 Swedish startups were part of the map.
AI Sweden and Ignite Sweden also arranged the European AI Startup Matchday which gathered 21 corporates and 85 startups from four different countries in Stockholm to meet international peers and participate in matchmaking with corporates.
My AI is the first personalized platform designed specifically for the AI community and industry. A 'Linkedin for AI', if you will. A place to get inspired, share know-how, network, and showcase your organization's work and what you're up to next.
2023 was a year of scaling for AI Sweden’s interactive platform My AI. The number of registered users has increased by 375% and the use case library is one of the most valued features.
Reach out to Agneta Jacobson or Mikael Ljungblom
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