Kasper Ludvigsen & Jesper Alkestrup
Chair of Danish Data Science Community & AI engineer at The Tech Collective
How a community effort beat big tech AI models
Learn how the Danish Data Science Community built the world's best embedding model for Scandinavian languages, outperforming models from OpenAI and Microsoft. Embedding models are central to many modern AI applications, but existing models aren't trained to perform well in lower-resource languages like Danish, Swedish and Norwegian. In this talk, we reveal the full technical story: synthetic data generation at scale, Llama-based training, and the fine-tuning recipe that took us to #1 on the Scandinavian Embedding Benchmark.
Kasper Ludvigsen
Kasper is co-founder and chair of Danish Data Science Community and management consultant and AI engineer with Implement Consulting group.
Jesper Alkestrup
Senior AI engineer at The Tech Collective, founder and board member of SoilSense and holder of the Open Source Excellence award 2026.