Nordic Data & AI Weekly: Money keeps pouring into generative AI, Nordic investment rounds in Encube, Sensonomic, Seasony, and all the latest news & resources
Recent funding, news, and resources for builders
Quick reads on value creation
Things to know, whether you are building 🛠 or investing 💰
🤔 Honeycomb on all the hard stuff nobody talks about when building products with LLMs —> including challenges with context windows, slowness of LLMs, difficulties with prompt engineering, the trade-off between correctness & usefulness, and the need to address compliance & legal issues.
🤔 The myth of the AI infrastructure phase —> rather than there being a recognisable infrastructure phase where that lays the foundations and is built first before applications follow on top, new LLM applications will tell us what LLM infrastructure needs to look like. Planes and then airports, cars and then roads, etc…
🏦 US VC Lightspeed sharing their view on AI in fintech.
🤔 A presentation sharing a simple framework for how companies can explore what to do with generative AI.
👩🏼🏫 Google launched a set of materials providing a learning path that guides you through generative AI, from the fundamentals of LLMs to deployment of applications.
📈 McKinsey has taken a look at the economic potential of generative AI, estimating that it could add somewhere between $2.6 trillion to $4.4 trillion annually to the global economy, with 75% of the value to fall across 4 areas: Customer operations, marketing and sales, software engineering, and R&D.
📊 A couple of surveys:
A BCG survey of 13,000 people in the workforce - from executive suite leaders to frontline employees - and how they feel about AI. There are some big differences between executives and employees which organisations need to address (80% of executives regularly use AI vs. 20% of employees, while employees tend to be far less optimistic about it).
In a survey by Stack Overflow, 70% of developers are already using or plan to use coding tools this year - even though there is not a lot of trust in them.
Recent AI funding in the Nordics & Baltics
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🇸🇪 Encube: Using collaborative AI to close the gap between design intent and manufactured outcome for precision machined parts. Raised an undisclosed amount from Inventure.
🇳🇴 Sensonomic: Enabling farmers to capture and store data, and benefit from predictive insight for yield predictions, sales planning, harvest planning, and logistics. Raised $465k from angels.
🇩🇰 Seasony: Automating the core processes in vertical farming with a modular autonomous mobile robot, thereby reducing labour costs and increasing yields through increased monitoring. Raised an undisclosed amount from angels.
Latest AI news & best reads in the Nordics & Baltics
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🗣 A good look at AI Sweden’s initiative to build its own LLM for all the major languages in the Nordic region.
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 🌍 🌎 🌏
Investors keep pouring money into generative AI…
4-week old French company Mistral AI raised $113m to compete with OpenAI and provide generative AI solutions for enterprises. The company is founded by alumni from Google’s DeepMind and Meta, and the round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with Redpoint, Index Ventures, and a host of other investors participating.
London-based Synthesia reached a $1bn valuation after raising $90m from Accel, Nvidia, Kleiner Perkins, GV, FirstMark Capital and MMC. The digital media platform lets users create artificial intelligence-generated videos.
Cohere raised $270m to continue developing its AI model ecosystem for enterprise.
Big tech and enterprises continue to go big on AI…
An in-depth interview with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella - outlining his beliefs in the transformative potential of AI, how Microsoft is integrating AI into its products, and his vision for the future.
Mark Zuckerberg announced a plan to Meta employees that will see it put generative AI text, image and video generators into its flagship products, such as Facebook and Instagram. And here he is speaking to Lex Fridman about the future of AI at Meta.
Accenture plans to invest $3 billion over three years into its data and AI practice, doubling the number of employees that are working with AI.
On safety and regulation…
🇪🇺 The European Parliament has approved landmark rules for artificial intelligence, known as the EU AI Act - while it is still some way from becoming law, it does represent the clearing a major hurdle towards formal regulation. The rules include requiring generative AI developers to submit their systems for review before releasing them commercially, as well as a ban on real-time biometric identification systems. More on the EU AI Act here. And here another look at how Europe is leading the world in pushing to regulate AI.
🇬🇧 Google DeepMind, OpenAI and Anthropic have agreed to open up their AI models to the U.K. government for research and safety purposes, which should “help build better evaluations and help us better understand the opportunities and risks of these systems,” according to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.
🇬🇧 The UK will host a major AI summit of ‘like-minded’ countries, as it looks to position itself as a power broker on the subject, carving a path between strict EU regulations and the lighter touch U.S. approach.
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