Which country invests the most in AI? The United States by a mile. No one else is close. But things look a little different if you adjust for the size of the country:
It may not come as a surprise that Israel has a high concentration of AI activity, but Sweden? I sure didn't expect that. Here's how overall private investment has changed over the past decade:
It's interesting that investment in generative AI (i.e., LLM models like ChatGPT or Claude) was tiny until 2023. I thought it had surged earlier than that. But the big spike in 2021 was all about older kinds of AI.
Saab
Spotify!
The country that surprised me most is the UAE. Since when did these guys try to be at the technological forefront? And the idea of an Arab country being a technological power (although no doubt they are importing the brains and the computing tech)... well, it's been a good half-millennium since that happened last.
Sweden has a surprisingly large number of tech people IIRC, although they usually migrate to the US if they get successful enough.
For one Sweden has Spotify, who *really* would rather not pay musicians their cut. It's the next step of what's been reported recently (https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machine-liz-pelly-spotify-musicians/).
Israel GDP = 510B
Sweden GDP = 593B
USA GDP = 27T
Do the math.
This actually isn't a very meaningful way to compare AI investment. Training a large-language model costs literally tens of billions of dollars. Israels GDP is estimated at $564 Billion (per Wikipedia), meaning .29% is $1.6 billion. Israel can't even get off the starting blocks in meaningful AI research with this budget.
Look at DeepSeek v3. You can do an awful lot if you're money-constrained but smart, both in the design of your AI system and in the hardware on which it is trained and runs.
I expect Israel ultimately to be a player in this space...
Another good reason to raise taxes on the rich, without all that extra money sloshing around there'll be less of it to spend on this garbage.
IKEA is a big user of Gen AI, and has been since the beginning. How else are they able to come up with their product names?