GenAI – the European Perspective
Day 1 | 11:45 – 12:15
Dr. Magnus Sahlgren
AI Sweden
Abstract
Large Language Models (LLMs) are currently at the top of the AI hype curve with new and increasingly powerful models being produced at an unprecedented pace. This development is mainly driven by private companies with access to substantial economic and computational resources, and models have as a result largely been kept proprietary and only made accessible via commercial APIs. Last year saw a surprising shift in this trend, with an increasing number of model developers releasing their models as open weight. Such open models are becoming increasingly competent, prompting some commentators to argue that the performance gap between proprietary and open models may be slowly closing. But how is Europe doing in this development? This talk presents a brief overview over the current developments of open LLMs with a special focus on the European region. Are we catching up, or are we lagging behind?
Dr. Magnus Sahlgren
Magnus Sahlgren is Head of Research for Natural Language Understanding at AI Sweden. Sahlgren has a PhD in computational linguistics, and his research lies at the intersection between computational linguistics, philosophy, and Artificial Intelligence. He is primarily known for his work on computational models of meaning, and he is currently driving initiatives to train Large Language Models for the Scandinavian languages. Sahlgren has previously held positions at the Research Institutes of Sweden (RISE), the Swedish Defense Research Agency (FOI), the Swedish Institute of Computer Science (SICS), Stockholm University, among others. Sahlgren is also affiliated with Silo as a Principal AI Scientist, and acts as an AI advisor to several Swedish startups.