Nina Ökvist appointed new Head of NLU at AI Sweden

Nina Ökvist, who holds a Master of Science in Computer Engineering, has spent the last 20 years working in systems development. She has worked as a systems developer and held various technical leadership roles within the public sector, spending the last four years as a manager in the field of AI. Nina has hands-on experience with the entire value chain of creating value with AI – from skills, infrastructure, and data to legal aspects, organization, and strategic management. Nina has a solid background in both national and international collaboration. For over a decade, she has also been an instructor in leadership and group development, including for the Swedish Defence University's UGL concept.

Nina's new role includes personnel responsibility and management of AI Sweden's NLU team, which is one of Sweden's leading research groups in large language models (LLMs). The team represents a strategic focus area for AI Sweden, aiming to accelerate innovation, application development, and the implementation of AI. The NLU team is behind GPT-SW3, Sweden's first large generative language model for Swedish, which AI Sweden launched in 2023 in collaboration with RISE and WASP WARA Media & Language.

Collaboration with OpenAI and Europe

AI Sweden and its NLU team have achieved significant international recognition in recent years. In August 2025, OpenAI and AI Sweden announced a collaboration that, among other things, granted AI Sweden early access to OpenAI's new open models and tasks AI Sweden with helping to evaluate how the models perform in real-world environments.

In the near future, the focus will also be on contributing to the development of open European language models. AI Sweden is part of the OpenEuroLLM project, a unique collaboration between 20 European partners, to promote European AI expertise and develop the next generation of open language models.