The demand and curiosity for Norwegian generative language models has been notable. The six models NorwAI published this summer have been downloaded more than 10 000 times.

– The models were made public for Scandinavian companies, public services and interested individuals in June. The numbers of downloads prove there is considerable interest and need for smaller models, says Professor Jon Atle Gulla, head of SFI NorwAI.

The models were published at Hugging Face, and players would fill in a small registration for identification.

– We’ve had requests to publish a white paper as an introduction to the models. That is on our agenda for the coming period. We also want to communicate with people who have downloaded the models to learn from their experiences. We are always interested in feedback, says Jon Atle Gulla.

The large interest resonates with the great participation at NorwAI Innovate, the yearly conference for the Norwegian AI community in September. This autumn more than 230 professionals from 70 different institutions, organisations and companies attended. Hopefully the next version of NorwAI Innovate will show some of the results from thousands of downloads.

– We are in the process of putting together a roadmap for our work with generative language models. I think we have proven our ability to build models that are competitive. Further cooperation with our partners is of course a major concern for us. The collaboration with media and finance partners like Schibsted, DNB, SpareBank1 SMN and others has been of great help to us so far. This will continue, says Jon Atle Gulla suggesting that fine tuned smaller LLMs for specific domains are fields to be looked into.

Depending on available data resources, models to specialize in both private and public sectors are of interest. Jon Atle Gulla confirms that NorwAI is discussing possible collaboration with both small and larger partners in the health sector.

– We were very pleased when the first start-up out of our shelves were presented at NorwAI innovate in September. The founders of ‘Medbric’ have created an innovative solution designed specifically for general practitioners (GPs) in the primary healthcare service.  ‘Medbric’ assists doctors in consultation by listening to the consultation and writing the medical record. The AI-based solution combines the skills of a medical secretary with the experience of a senior doctor.  More than 100 GPs have participated in Medbrics pilot program, says Jon Atle Gulla about a start-up  that has caught the eye of doctors and players abroad.

– What’s else up in your sleeve?

– He, he! I like to present results more than just plans, says Jon Atle Gulla and continues:

– We are of course involved in several projects competing for the AI Billion right now. This involves a larger part of our AI research capacity as we also work on other aspects than just language models, he says. 

In November we hosted a large conference for lingvistic and engineering researchers working on LLMs for minority languages here in the Nordics. Luckily, we have also for years now collaborated on various levels with other Nordic research centers and universities throughout Scandinavia and beyond to keep up with the AI research frontiers internationally. This will also bring opportunities the coming year, says Jon Atle Gulla.

– What about an API service for the NorLLM models?

– Many has asked for this. This is a real challenge, but we are giving it a lot of thoughts as we are putting together our upcoming roadmap. Depending on data access, generating even more models, is on NorwAI’s agenda. With ten new research positions up for hire, our capacity will increase in the next years, says Jon Atle Gulla.

In 2025 the research center and its partners will announce seven new positions open for research fellows. The positions for next year are five PhD positions and two postdoctorial fellows. In addition, NorwAI is this autumn currently hiring three PhDs and one post. doc. where candidates already have applied and interviews are in progress. The positions are dedicated to different work programs and will be situated in Stavanger, Gjøvik and Trondheim.

Published 2024-11-26

By: Rolf D. Svendsen