Norwegian Centre on General-purpose Artificial Intelligence

Success along the AI race is mostly about attracting talents and skilled professionals. It is not about the volume of investments, developments and adoption. This is what we are experiencing in the past weeks with the raise of a new player DeepSeek AI under the tech leaders, thanks to the mass of skilled people. Attracting talents is also one the three key pillars of the AI centre “GenAI4NO” submitted by NORCE to the AI billion call of the Research Council of Norway.
GenAI4NO stands for “Norwegian Centre on General-purpose Artificial Intelligence”, with the ambitious aim of AI in a physical world to contribute to the visibility of Norway along the AI supply chain.
GenAI4NO gathers over 20 PIs in Norway with 1-3 decades of track record in areas including neuroscience, machine learning, robotics, data/information science, computing, security, social, societal and human sciences…etc. Partners combine their expertise together with international collaborators to establish, as a first pillar, novel foundations of large AI models, which are agentic, flexible and align with observable reality and are able to deal with the physical world, robots, machines and industrial processes.

The second pillar consists of establishing 8 testbeds hosted both Norway and abroad by user partners to enable real-world data collection and validation in practice. As a third pillar, the centre strives for ambitious recruitment and targets investing in AI skills to power the workforce feeding the innovation ecosystem. Norway with most vibrant technology landscape in AI will better be positioned to attract skilled professionals and retain local talents feeding the innovation ecosystem in Norway.

The GenAI4NO centre focuses on General-Purpose AI (GPAI) in tackling comprehensive engineering challenges of real- world applications, e.g. robots, machines and industrial processes, operating in a dynamic physical world. Today, large AI models involve pre-training on extensive datasets and fine-tuning to specific tasks or newer data. However, available datasets are often static, including only limited modalities. Hence, continuous updates and

refinements are needed to maintain situation awareness, operational effectiveness, as well as flexibility for robots acting in ever-changing environments. The centre aims to establish a human-centric paradigm on radically new fundamentals using evolutionary and agentic learning architecture that align large AI models with observable reality.

Furthermore, it opens up agentic GPAI for innovative (Business to Business) applications with high value creation potential. Further uptakes and business opportunities of innovative AI shall be explored on testbeds hosted by the listed industrial and user partners, providing real-world data in its practical contexts, domain knowledge and stakeholder business requirements. The centre is a consortium of key Norwegian actors in AI and robotics including research institutes and businesses for testbeds in aquaculture, energy, metallurgy, robotics, transport, construction and Manufacturing. Collaboration with international research partners will allow part time positions in Norway and strategic PhD students to enrich the competences.