The King's Swedish: AI Rewrites the Book in Scandinavia

If the King of Sweden wants help drafting his annual Christmas speech this year, he could ask the same AI model that's available to his 10 million subjects. As a test, researchers prompted the model, called GPT-SW3, to draft one of the royal messages, and it did a pretty good job, according to Magnus Sahlgren, who heads research in natural language understanding at AI Sweden, a consortium kickstarting the country's journey into the machine learning era. "Later, our minister of digitalization visited us and asked the model to generate arguments for political positions and it came up with some really clever ones -- and he intuitively understood how to prompt the model to generate good text," Sahlgren said. Early successes inspired work on an even larger and more powerful version of the language model they hope will serve any citizen, company or government agency in Scandinavia. The current version packs 3.6 billion parameters and is smart enough to do a few cool things in Swedish.