Norway breath taking beauty
Last month while travelling in Norway, I had the pleasure of researching Norway and published in Forbes an article on this beautiful country’s advancements in AI.
I had the recent pleasure of interviewing NORA.ai CEO, Klas Pettersen to appreciate his personal story as so often we think to be leading in the field of AI, you must come from an AI engineering background, and this is so not accurate.
To get AI Right, we need many diverse perspectives; disciplines from theology, sciences ethics, mathematicians, humanities, social sciences, our hard core AI engineers, data scientists, and functional disciplines, finance, legal, HR, sales, marketing etc.
With the intelligence world changes rapidly underway, every business function, industry, private or public, AI is transforming business processes, practices, infrastructures - and it’s simply an AI everywhere reality.
Travelling and learning about different cultures and meeting talented and diverse AI leaders helps us appreciate what’s possible. It opens our eyes on strategies to create partnerships in new research communities that are doubling down on specific use cases. Why look just in North America, or the UK or Canada, or Asia.
Why not look at Norway?
We need to collaborate to ensure humanity is leading the future vs AI leading humanity everywhere.
Every leader has roots and I am always curious as to what CEO’s leading AI organizations have studied as there is so much wisdom in listening to their stories about how they have advanced their organizations success, and also what lessons have they learned in their journeys so we ensure we all grow a little more. Enjoy learning about Klas Pettersen, his career journey, his passion for his family and wrestling, and what mentorship means to him.
Klas’s masters was in quantum mechanics. When he finished his thesis, he went backpacking for about half a year. This was in the first half of the year 2000, some years after Alex Garland wrote the book The Beach, which inspired many in his age to travel to beaches and islands like Koh Phangan in Thailand. One of the books that Klas read on this journey was the Shadows of the Mind by Roger Penrose. The book is about consciousness, and as he was a physicist, it inspired him to ask bigger questions about how the brain works. After his travels, Klas joined Accenture, but knew in his heart he needed to pursue a Ph.D. and met professor Gaute Einevoll, who propelled Klas’s academic curiosity forward and helped him secure a grant within computational neuroscience, and advance his Ph.D. studies.
Klas decided to do a change in his doctoral research career was when game 2 move 37 between Lee Sedol and AlphaGo happened in 2016. An inspiring read of Penrose’s book Klas was able to dig further into big questions like: What is intelligence? What is consciousness?
AI was always a bit on the side of Klas’s youth beat, as he was always playing board games, especially chess. When DeepMind made its dramatic improvements within the AI field, Klas like many of us AI leaders took notice.
And when the successor, AlphaZero, beat the best chess programs in 2017 by pure self-learning, Klas started reading up on how these algorithms worked, and soon realized that they would be powerful far beyond board games.
So Klas changed his research field to studying artificial neural networks, and started to apply deep learning in his neuroscience research. About a year or two later, an announcement was made: several universities and research institutes in Norway would start a collaboration within AI. When the consortium, NORA, was established, Klas applied for the CEO position in April 2019 and the advancements that have been made are plentiful.
Some of the early beginnings of NORA.ai was establishing a collaborative ecosystem. Due to the importance of the field of AI, six sectors and leaders of research institutes in Norway announced that they would establish a Norwegian consortium for AI research institutions in late 2018. When Klas started as the CEO in April 2019, he was given quite a bit of freedom to build this consortium. He and his team were able to bring together 16 of the major universities and research institutions on board with the vision of international relevance and excellence in AI research, education and innovation for Norwegian universities and research institutions.
NORA.ai has already established a strong international actor and collaborator within the AI industry, and helping to advance the Norwegian competence and infrastructure within AI. Currently, NORA.ai is focused on its National Research School in AI, building a national infrastructure for AI and establishing a closer collaboration between universities and industry/public sector.
Internationally NORA.ai is closely linked to The Alan Turing Insitute (UK), HIDA (Germany), the National Labs of Department of Energy (USA and Klas was active in establishing this MoU) and the AI structures in the other Nordic countries (NORA created this Nordic conference and this Nordic AI journal). As a result of these initiatives, there are many there are now many strong collaborations between UK and Norwegian researchers.
NORA.ai has a strong standing in the Norwegian government and is now often called upon as advisors.
Like most AI ecosystems, commercialization is important and now has an innovation branch, NORA.startup. There are now more 40 exciting AI startups in Norway where innovators, researchers and students are coming together to share knowledge, experience and form new projects and companies.
Inspired by the UK taskforce on foundation models, Klas and his team are actively engaging most of the academic institutions in Norway, so talent can be easily tapped to help build out projects of national importance. Currently NORA.ai is helping to establish an infrastructure for a Norwegian language model.
There are also many ongoing projects, but the most interesting that NORA.ai wants to establish and where they need international partners is the infrastructure needed for large language models. Klas’s vision is that NORA.ai wants to build a language model with Norwegian, and other Scandinavian languages and English. They are building not just a language model but also building an infrastructure for language models, and providing solutions and fine tuned models to meet public sector and industry needs. They have a large national consortium, including universities, research institute and the Norwegian National Library, etc.
Norway is strong within the health sector and has excellent registry data. Klas stressed that it can be challenging with international collaborations on sensitive data, but it is absolutely possible and advised NORA.ai has had several meetings with US National Labs to see if they can establish strong international collaboration to create better diagnostic tools and precision medicine products.
Klaus also shared that he thinks that the EU AI Act is very much needed, but also highlighted the hard balancing act to regulate without hindering innovation too much. His biggest concern is if regulation impacts open research in ways that impact collaboration and innovation. He stressed how important to ensure that open-source R&D can reasonably comply with the AI Act and that also a “one size fits all” framework that treats all foundation models as high-risk could make it impossible to field low-risk and open-source models in Europe, as has been recently pointed out in an open letter from LAION to the European Parliament.
Appreciating how leaders balance work and life was an interesting conversation with Klas as he has four children, all boys, aged 8 to 15 years old and his family loves wrestling together. “ So the last few years, the moment I step inside my door I have automatically been unwinded. But I am also engaged in wrestling. The last six years, I have been the leader of one of Norway’s largest wrestling club, and all my children are doing wrestling. Weekends are typically spent at a wrestling tournament for younger athletes somewhere in the Nordics. It’s rewarding to see children and youth developing self confidence through their exercises. And we are doing quite well in the club. We were the best club in the National Championships this year (2023), and a female wrestler was second in the world championship, which is quite exceptional from a Norwegian. I also do a bit of wrestling myself. And, yes, this engagement is something I started years before the big AI leaders, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, made it a thing for AI leaders to be engaged in martial arts, shared Klas”
In my research articles, I always want to appreciate how we can bring wisdom forward and there were Klas’s parting comments from our interview together.
“Be a doer. Do your programming. Learn the techniques. Engage in the community. And maybe the most important thing: find a good mentor. Good mentors means a lot. Good mentors should not only focus on the results, they should be like a good wrestling coach: they should guide you on many aspects of life, and really focus on your career, your performance and how to help you improve. And to the older ones out there: be a good mentor! “
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