The launch of generative AI products over the past nine months has the world talking about how it will change the future. Many are frigh
The launch of generative AI products over the past nine months has the world talking about how it will change the future. Many are frightened. Others are excited about the opportunity.
A report last month from Next Move Strategy Consulting predicts the AI industry will grow 20x in the next seven years, creating a $2 trillion business, up from its current value of $100 billion. It might sound like wild hype, but other analysts from McKinsey, Morgan Stanley and BlackRock all map out a similar trajectory. AI is here to stay, and a lot of human lives will be upended. But it’s also the chance of a lifetime.
Frederik Pedersen, the co-founder of Danish AI company EasyTranslate and son of one of Denmark’s most famous men, is approaching the future head-on.
“I have been saying for a long time that translation is dead and AI has killed the industry as we know it, but that hasn’t gone down particularly well with my competitors. Now, however, those same people are listening and are realising that they may be too late if they want to transform their business.”
Son of Danish politician Klaus Riskær Pedersen
It’s not easy to be the child of a powerful person, as has been recently and brilliantly illustrated by the TV series Succession. If there’s a Logan Roy in the family, it’s difficult for the child to be their own person.
Some crash and burn; some, such as singers Justin Bieber and Miley Cyrus, try to shock their parents by being outlandish and independent. It’s rarely a good look.
Others, however, do it in smarter ways and emerge from that parental shadow by adopting different mechanisms to build their own reputation.
In the case of Pederson, now 35, it was technology that enabled him to do so. First, with translation software, and now, generative AI has overtaken it.
His dad, Klaus Riskær Pedersen, is a controversial Danish political party leader, entrepreneur, businessman and author. Everybody in Denmark knows his name.
His chequered career includes being a member of the European Parliament for the Liberal Party, writing books, developing, building and selling around 15 companies over three decades. He set up his own political party in 2018.
But there have been controversies. He has several convictions for fraud and has spent different spells in jail, as well as splitting Danish public opinion and having the social life that goes with such apparent conviviality.
At first, (Frederik) Pedersen suffered. In and out of schools, he tried to find a way of acceptance and struggled. He didn’t make it to university, but he did know about technology and became interested in its power and consequently found a way to plow his own furrow.
“It took me some time to find a direction, but slowly I realized that the world was all about communication. I knew I was from a privileged family, but educators always seemed to have a lack of empathy and communication when I was a child. I was made to feel different, and it was a difficult place to be.
“But I came through it, and those life lessons set me up for all the changes that life throws at you. So I set up a translation company, and now I’m pivoting the company into generative AI because of the huge opportunity it offers humanity, not least the same elements of communication,” says Pedersen.
Early access to OpenAI’s ChatGPT
The AI light started to dawn on him back in 2020.
That year, Pedersen applied to the Danish Innovation Fund for a 65,000 euro grant to create a content generator engine that would enable him to create a new form of translation:
“I realized that the biggest issue in e-commerce when it came to languages was not translation in itself, but creating localized content for retailers’ different products that customers could relate to,” he explains, adding the company spent the money to train “neural networks to create these product descriptions.”
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A neural network is a type of machine learning process called deep learning that uses interconnected nodes or neurons in a layered structure that resembles the human brain.
“We branded it content-as-a-service and couldn’t believe we were one of the first companies to do it,” he says, though it ended up proving the old adage that being early is the same as being wrong.
“Ultimately we were ahead of the technology and while our technology could build sentences, it just wasn’t good enough for our customers.”
This first effort was not wasted time and money, however, as it meant the company was able to hit the ground running when large language models were released publicly. EasyTranslate obtained early access to ChatGPT because it already had an account with OpenAI and was able to adopt and execute the technology instantly.
From that point,…
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