Latest news with #PeterSarlin
Yahoo
19-05-2025
- Automotive
- Yahoo
Unikie aims to become the leading AI Lab in the Nordics: The company increases investments in AI development
The company's Chief Technology Officer Niko Haatainen will take charge of the AI Lab and Peter Sarlin will invest in the company. Unikie's logo on our office building From left: Niko Haatainen (CTO, Unikie), Peter Sarlin (CEO, AMD Silo AI), and Juha Ala-Laurila (CEO, Unikie) TAMPERE, Finland, May 19, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Technology and innovation company Unikie has made a significant investment in artificial intelligence by establishing a new AI Lab that aims to accelerate the adoption of artificial intelligence by customer companies and expand the use of artificial intelligence in its own product development and business. The new AI laboratory will serve as the spearhead of Unikie's artificial intelligence expertise. Its operations are led by the company's CTO Niko Haatainen, and Silo AI's founder and AMD Silo AI's CEO Peter Sarlin invests in the company. "Using artificial intelligence in our own development has given us an understanding of what AI really changes. This allows us to help our customers on a genuinely practical level – not just based on theory," says the company's CTO Niko Haatainen. A strong foundation for an international-level AI player Unikie has a strong track record of developing and utilizing artificial intelligence extensively – from serving Europe's largest automotive companies to smart drones and other smart devices, such as mobile phones. The company's CTO Niko Haatainen, who is responsible for artificial intelligence, leads the AI team, as part of an international technology organization of about 600 people. Unikie's team has implemented numerous concrete AI projects, for example, for autonomous driving, drone technology and manufacturing applications, covering machine vision, the use of language models, traditional machine learning, and model architectures related to deep neural networks. The company serves clients in the network and communications, automotive, transport and logistics, and manufacturing and retail industries, including several Fortune 500 companies. The company's own product for autonomous driving, Unikie Marshalling Solution, is an example of the deep integration of AI into a productized solution, which revolutionizes the logistics of car factories, ports and logistics compounds by automating, for example, the transfer of cars from factories to dealerships. In addition, AI has been widely implemented across the company's own software and product development processes – from coding and testing to HR processes by utilizing various language models and AI-based tools. "Unikie is an excellent example of Finnish technology expertise that is strongly tied to practical work. The company has deep experience in demanding AI projects in industry and vehicle technology, a strong internal development team and its own product with artificial intelligence at its core. These are exactly the building blocks that will create the next generation of European AI operators," Sarlin says. The AI Lab supports customers' AI journey Unikie plans to increase its AI team to 100 specialists over the next twelve months. "Unikie's strong investment in the concrete use of artificial intelligence will bring significant business benefits to our customers. I am particularly pleased that we have Peter as our AI laboratory advisor to support our growth," says , CEO of Unikie. The aim of the AI Lab is to bring artificial intelligence solutions closer to customers' business and product development. Focus areas include the following AI-enabled solutions: Device-centric AI applications, such as autonomous vehicles, computer vision solutions, drone technology, and industrial automation. Real-time quality assurance and process control using AI, delivering measurable cost savings to clients. Internal AI tools that accelerate software development and improve work quality. "I believe that the value of AI will ultimately be measured by how deeply it is integrated into products and processes. Unikie is now in an excellent position to take the next growth leap and become one of Europe's top AI players," Sarlin concludes. More info:Unikie's AI offering: cases: Elina Mansner, Communications, Unikie, +358 44 044 7767, Juha Ala-Laurila, CEO, Unikie, +358 50 553 4773, Unikie is a global software engineering and innovation company that provides intelligent solutions for the automotive, logistics, manufacturing, smart devices, and defence industries. The company makes extensive use of its expertise in advanced technologies, data analytics and the application of AI in embedded software development The company aspires to be the preferred partner for leading players in their fields and a recommended employer for experienced software experts. Unikie's customers include companies like BMW, Ford, Mercedes-Benz, Jaguar Land Rover, Cariad, Scania, Cargotec, Valmet, Sandvik and Nokia. Photos accompanying this announcement are available at: in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Yahoo
10-02-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
AI's English focus puts many countries at a disadvantage. A new EU project aims to fix that for 32 languages
An ambitious new AI project has begun to take shape in Europe, with the aim of developing open-source AI models that support the region's 24 official languages and more—while also complying as much as possible with its thicket of digital legislation. The OpenEuroLLM project, which commenced work at the start of the month, has a budget of just €37.4 million ($38.6 million): a pittance compared with the sums being invested in other AI-related projects like the $100 billion first tranche of the U.S.'s Stargate AI infrastructure project. Although participating companies such as Germany's Aleph Alpha and Finland's Silo AI are also contributing their researchers' time to an equivalent value, the bulk of the funding comes from the European Commission. EU-funded projects don't tend to move fast, and this one has a three-year road map in a sector that's currently undergoing significant evolution each month. But organizers and participants tell Fortune that it could be possible to deliver an intermediate model within a year—and the effort will be worth it. 'Most model development efforts that have worldwide visibility focus on the English language,' said Yasser Jadidi, chief research officer at Aleph Alpha. 'It's a consequence of most of the internet text data that is available and accessible being in English, and it puts other languages at a disadvantage.' For people in places like Sweden or Turkey (the OpenEuroLLM project is also targeting the tongues of eight countries that have applied for EU membership, so that the project encompasses a total of 32 languages) the lack of AI models that understand the intricacies of their languages can be a serious problem. For a start, it makes it harder for local companies and public authorities to adopt the technology and start providing new services. 'It's first and foremost a commercial question,' said Peter Sarlin, the CEO of Silo AI, Europe's largest private AI lab, which was acquired by AMD last year and is participating in OpenEuroLLM. 'Are there models that are performant in that specific low-resource language, be it Albanian or Finnish or Swedish or some other, that allows companies within that region to eventually build services on top?' The issue also has consequences for evaluating the accuracy and safety of AI models in the local context, Jadidi said. Indeed, Aleph Alpha's role in the project is chiefly to provide AI-model evaluation benchmarks that aren't simply machine-translated from English, as most are. The OpenEuroLLM project may have relatively meager funding, but it isn't starting from scratch. Most of its participants have already been involved in a separate scheme called High Performance Language Technologies (HPLT), which started two years ago with a budget of just €6 million. The original proposal was for HPLT to deliver AI models, but then OpenAI's ChatGPT changed the AI landscape and the organizers pivoted to creating a high-quality dataset that can be used to train multilingual models. The HPLT dataset is currently being 'cleaned' of errors, and it will form the basis of OpenEuroLLM's work. OpenEuroLLM will create a base model trained on a dataset of all the European languages. Once that's done, yet another EU-funded project, called LLMs4EU, will fine-tune it for various applications. Apart from cash, the EU is also providing computational resources to all these schemes. Europe is not the easiest place for AI companies to do business. Quite apart from the AI Act that is gradually coming into force, placing all sorts of reporting responsibilities on model providers and their customers, there's also copyright and competition law to consider—and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which places strict limits on the personal data that AI companies can use. These laws have had real effects on AI's European progress, with Meta delaying the rollout of Meta AI because of GDPR limits, and Apple also delaying the deployment of Apple Intelligence because of unspecified antitrust issues. (Apple Intelligence will come to EU iPhones in limited form in April, while Meta has started offering some Meta AI features to European wearers of its smart glasses.) As far as OpenEuroLLM's organizers are concerned, these laws are manageable. 'We believe we can live with all of them,' said Jan Hajič of Charles University in Czechia, who is co-leading the project with Sarlin. Hajič said the participants had already dealt with the copyright and most privacy issues when developing the HPLT dataset. 'The GDPR could be a problem, but that's something we are trying to get around with pseudonymizing the data, meaning that if we encounter people's names it gets deleted,' he said, while acknowledging that the necessary automation in this process may not have a 100% success rate. 'Our goal is to do things in such a way that they will not clash with the European regulation in any way,' Hajič said, adding that this could be a draw for companies wanting to target EU markets. For high-risk use cases that will require a lot of reporting to the EU authorities under the AI Act, the open-source approach will be essential for the transparency it allows, he argued. The OpenEuroLLM project has 20 participants including companies, research institutions, and high-performance computing clusters like Finland's Lumi. This setup could be seen as a liability with the potential for diverging priorities, but Aleph Alpha's Jadidi argued that open-source projects often include a wide array of participants without being dragged down. 'We have all the opportunity to ensure that a high amount of contributors is not a hindrance but an opportunity,' he said. This story was originally featured on
