Nordic Data & AI Weekly: A deep-dive on AI activity in Europe, AI-generated presidential elections, recent Nordic investment rounds, and opinion on technical breakthroughs or hot air
Recent funding, news, and resources for builders
Quick reads on value creation
Things to know, whether you are building 🛠 or investing 💰
📊 Atomico published The State of European Tech 2023, including:
A specific look at AI investment activity in Europe, some takeaways
AI is the top theme at seed and is capturing 17% of capital across all stages
Carbon & energy, and health are the vertical applications capturing the most attention
Europe has more AI talent than the US, and
Interviews with
💡 Rubén Domínguez from Mundi Ventures compiled some useful GPTs for individuals working in Startups and Venture Capital funds.
📺 Andrej Karpathy (OpenAI engineer, and former Senior Director of AI at Tesla) with a video “Intro to Large Language Models”.
👩🏼🏫 Microsoft has created a free 12 lesson course “Generative AI for Beginners”.
Recent AI funding in the Nordics & Baltics
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🇸🇪 Scaleout: Federated learning platform enabling you to leverage siloed, business sensitive and regulated data in your machine learning pipelines. Raised $1.55m from Navigare Ventures, Almi Invest, Uppsala University Holding, Beijerstiftelsen, S-E Bankens Utvecklingsstiftelse, and angels (link).
🇸🇪 Inceptron: Revolutionising AI computer vision applications with reconfigurable hardware (FPGAs) in the cloud, offering up to 100x performance, 50% cost reduction, and 60% less power consumption versus other generic hardware platforms such as GPUs. Raised $2.12m from 42CAP, and Dreamcraft Ventures.
🇩🇰 Factbird: Helping manufacturers to gather, manage, and analyse production data from any machine or process in order to improve operations - data can be analysed in real time to detect quality issues, downtime, or bottlenecksm and identify opportunities to increase productivity. Raised $16m from Expedition Growth Capital, and EIFO (link).
If there is some relevant Nordic AI news or funding that is missing from this newsletter, feel free to share by replying directly or emailing nordicaiweekly@substack.com and I’ll look to spread the word next week. Thanks!
News from the wider world 🌍 🌎 🌏
🤔 Has OpenAI has a big technical breakthrough?
It continues to be suggested that part of what triggered the board decision to (temporarily) oust CEO Sam Altman was a significant “breakthrough” in AI that had alarmed staff members. Researchers reportedly had come up with a new way to make powerful AI systems and had created a new model, called Q* (pronounced Q star), that was able to perform grade-school-level math. (Note that no actual information exits regarding Q*, so it remains rumour).
As Azeem Azhar puts it, while ‘grade-school maths’ doesn’t seem like much, with exponential progress of the type we’ve witnessed, grade-school maths could quickly become PhD maths.
According to Wenda Li, an AI lecturer at the University of Edinburgh, math is a benchmark for reasoning, and a machine that is able to reason about mathematics, could, in theory, be able to learn to do other tasks that build on existing information, such as writing computer code or drawing conclusions from a news article. MIT Tech Review explores more in an article here.
And more commentary here from Yann LeCun, here from Gary Marcus, and here from Samuel Hammond.
This article from TechCrunch breaks down why it’s not a big deal, or even necessarily something new.
🆕 Inflection AI - the company founded by LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman and DeepMind cofounder Mustafa Suleyman - announced Inflection-2, a new AI model that it claims is “the best model in the world for its compute class and the second most capable LLM in the world today.“ The model will soon be integrated into the company’s Pi chatbot.
📰 The New York Times takes a look at the Argentinian presidential election - the first major election fought with a lot of AI-generated imagery. And we can expect a lot more to follow.
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