{"id":149775,"date":"2025-11-20T08:06:09","date_gmt":"2025-11-20T08:06:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/149775\/"},"modified":"2025-11-20T08:06:09","modified_gmt":"2025-11-20T08:06:09","slug":"building-a-platform-to-allow-companies-handle-the-huge-amount-of-data-that-goes-with-ai-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/149775\/","title":{"rendered":"Building a platform to allow companies handle the huge amount of data that goes with AI \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

When Jim Dowling began studying artificial intelligence in Trinity College<\/a> in the early 1990s, few enough people knew what it was. Fewer still could have predicted its far-reaching impact when what had been a slow burn for years suddenly caught fire.<\/p>\n

\u201cI finished my BA in AI in 1996 and at that time AI was pretty much irrelevant. Now it\u2019s completely changing the nature of work and life. That\u2019s a pretty impressive shift to have witnessed,\u201d Dowling says.<\/p>\n

From Lucan, Dowling is the lead founder of Hopsworks, a platform that enables organisations to build and operate their own AI systems. The company was formed in 2018 when Dowling, then an associate professor at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, left the university to start the business in the Swedish capital.<\/p>\n

It was a brave move, but one Dowling had seen executed successfully by Chris Horn<\/a> at Iona Technologies (now an Irish Times columnist), who had been head of DSG (distributed systems group) in Trinity College when Dowling was a computer science undergraduate there. <\/p>\n

\u201cChris and his team left en masse and when I decided we had a viable proposition, I followed their playbook,\u201d says Dowling, who originally moved to Stockholm to join his girlfriend, now his wife, who is Swedish.<\/p>\n

\u201cIona was developing much-needed core infrastructure, something that\u2019s feasible in an academic environment because research is at the heart of what you do. In a commercial environment it would be practically impossible because the challenges and risks involved are too great and the probability of success too low,\u201d Dowling says. <\/p>\n

\u201cIona addressed the problem of connecting computers together. Hopsworks is addressing the problem of how to build software that can handle the huge amounts of data that go with AI. Our novel solution is based on scaling data for AI and we are now enabling our users to use AI to build AI.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m not the only one from DSG in Trinity to have started a business,\u201d Dowling says. \u201cThat group produced a lot of start-ups, largely because there was such a concentration of PhDs within it. There are not enough academic posts to go around and that created a very strong entrepreneurial spin-out environment where people were asking, what\u2019s missing in terms of core infrastructure and how can we build it?<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I went to KTH, I tried to reproduce the same environment. By then I\u2019d also worked with MySQL\u201d \u2013 one of the world\u2019s most widely deployed open source database management systems \u2013 \u201cin a senior technical role. <\/p>\n

\u201cDatabases are the engines that power our data infrastructure and by recruiting people with deep expertise from MySQL and combining them with my team from KTH University, we have been able to compete globally with the world\u2019s best in building software infrastructure support for AI,\u201d Dowling says. <\/p>\n

Dowling was able to develop and test the first version of the platform at KTH with funding from the European Union and the Swedish government. \u201cThis early funding is critical as it\u2019s very hard to get money from investors when you\u2019re building deep tech as it\u2019s way too risky in their eyes,\u201d he says. \u201cHowever, you will attract venture capital when they see you have something with large-scale commercial value. What helped us secure funding was that we had a confirmed buyer for our system.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hopsworks\u2019 first investor was Steve Collins from Irish VC Frontline Ventures, and its biggest backer to date is Finnish-based Inventure Capital. The company raised \u20ac1.25 million in its first round followed by \u20ac5 million in 2021 and a further \u20ac6 million in 2023. It will raise funds again, but not until next year. <\/p>\n

\u201cWe currently generate more of our income in the US than in Europe, mainly because US companies are more willing to take a punt on a new technology. We employ 36 people and have grown by 280 per cent in the last 12 months,\u201d Dowling says. \u201cWe are in the top 100 start-ups for the Nordics and Benelux on Sifted 100\u2033 \u2013 the FT-backed analysis and commentary on the European start-up community \u2013 \u201cand are the leading AI software infrastructure company on that list. <\/p>\n

\u201cOur annually recurring revenue is $2.7 million\u201d (\u20ac2.3 million) \u201cand we expect to triple this by the end of 2026.\u201d<\/p>\n

Building deep tech requires high-calibre people; there are 11 PhDs on the Hopsworks staff while the company\u2019s engineers are all educated to master\u2019s level or above. <\/p>\n

\u201cThis is where the university system is incredibly important but also the interaction between the university system and industry,\u201d Dowling says. <\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I went to KTH, I saw they had a PhD in refrigeration technology and I couldn\u2019t believe it. It was so specific. But it exists to help Swedish companies working with refrigeration to be world-leading. <\/p>\n

\u201cIn Germany there\u2019s a technical university system and we\u2019ve kind of tried to do this in Ireland but not as successfully yet. The highest-calibre students still tend to gravitate towards the traditional universities which, by and large, have not embraced their potential role as the engines of modern technology.\u201d <\/p>\n

The Hopsworks platform is horizontal, meaning it\u2019s not just for one industry. This is reflected in the spread of the company\u2019s customers, which include Paddy Power, Ericsson, fashion and accessories ecommerce company Zalando and Sweden\u2019s prestigious medical research university the Karolinska Institute. Former car manufacturer Saab, which is now a defence company making fighter jets, is also a customer. <\/p>\n

Dowling says that while Hopsworks is on a roll, there is no time to sit back and savour the taste of success. \u201cWe operate in an area that\u2019s essentially a moving target and, like anyone starting a company in a fast-moving space, you have two choices. You either pick a niche, do it well and hope to get acquired by a bigger player or you go for broke with the big idea and do it better than anyone else. <\/p>\n

\u201cOption one is a reasonable strategy, but I\u2019m not a reasonable guy,\u201d Dowling adds. \u201cGeorge Bernard Shaw said that \u2018the reasonable man adapts himself to the world around him; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.\u2019 I suppose we\u2019re a bit like Tesla. We too started from scratch with an ambitious goal to become the highest performer in the data for AI space.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"‘We\u2018We can bridge the technical gap between all the data coming in and giving researchers the fast and accurate insights they need\u2019 <\/p>\n

As a practical example of where Hopsworks fits into the AI firmament, Dowling refers to the company\u2019s involvement with the Karolinska Institute, where the amount of data storage required is calculated in petabytes, with one petabyte being roughly equivalent to one million gigabytes or the storage contained in about 1,000 laptops. <\/p>\n

\u201cA team of researchers at Karolinska is working on cervical cancer and all Swedish women are screened at a certain age and the samples taken are run through a sequencing machine to extract the DNA and turn it into digital representation,\u201d Dowling says. \u201cThis generates a massive amount of data because each human piece of DNA has three billion pieces of information. <\/p>\n

\u201cProcessing this data in a way that makes it accessible and usable is a huge challenge and that\u2019s where organisations can leverage the value of our platform. We can bridge the technical gap between all the data coming in and giving researchers the fast and accurate insights they need.\u201d <\/p>\n

Chief executives often get stick for the size of their pay packets but Dowling says he earns roughly the same salary as a computer programmer in Ireland and not as much as some of the higher-paid ones. <\/p>\n

\u201cHaving a modest income is not an issue in Sweden.\u201d As he lives in a rent-controlled apartment in Stockholm, childcare costs are very low \u2013 and the public transport system is excellent. Like many of those living in the Swedish archipelago, Dowling has a boat and one of the lifestyle advantages of where he lives is that he can walk from his apartment to his mooring. <\/p>\n

\u201cSwedish people take pride in Swedish companies and they tend to prefer to buy Swedish and expect their products and services to be of the highest quality. Irish people don\u2019t tend to have the same attitude to buying Irish when it comes to software or products,\u201d Dowling says. <\/p>\n

[\u00a0Coming AI revolution needs a serious Government responseOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you speak Swedish as a native English speaker, you earn their instant respect as they know you don\u2019t need to learn Swedish to live in Stockholm. The Teutonic punctuality can be a surprise to Irish people. You will get a cross eye if you suggest the meeting should have started without you because you were late.<\/p>\n

\u201cBeing a boss in Sweden is not universally considered an achievement given the compressed wage structure and the very bottom-up, consensus-driven business culture. The boss cannot just \u2018point with the whole hand\u2019 [tell you what to do]. As a boss, you need to explain, discuss and reach agreement on strategy, tasks, delivery and expectations. The good side of this is that people work more independently and take responsibility seriously, with less need for management. The rats don\u2019t dance on the table when the cat is away.\u201d <\/p>\n

Dowling is a dyed-in-the-wool techie who has watched the AI explosion with mixed feelings. As a former academic and researcher, he appreciates the scale of what has been achieved at an intellectual level. However, as someone who understands the ramifications of AI better than most, he has deep concerns about Europe\u2019s lack of digital sovereignty. <\/p>\n

In particular, he is very unhappy about Europe\u2019s dependence on the systems developed by US tech giants Microsoft, Amazon, Apple and Google. These systems determine not only how commerce runs in Europe but they also control vast swathes of national infrastructures and public utilities across the bloc. <\/p>\n

If Microsoft wanted, it could close down a small country in a few hours just by withdrawing its service, Dowling says, adding that where once these infrastructure providers were seen as benign, changes in the US administration mean this is no longer the case. <\/p>\n

\u201cIf you don\u2019t have digital sovereignty, you don\u2019t have sovereignty as a country and right now, we don\u2019t control the digital infrastructure that underpins our society,\u201d he says. \u201cEurope has not been building for the technical era we now live in. As a result, it\u2019s running a huge technical infrastructure deficit.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe essentially invited the Americans in to build the cloud. Nokia, which could have been one of Europe\u2019s big hitters with its one-time \u2018ownership\u2019 of the mobile space, ended up as one of its greatest catastrophes, and the infrastructure gain was lost to US companies. The compounding problem is that when you lose a platform, you lose all the ancillary parts around it. Europe lost the core mobile phone segment and has ended up just building apps. Sure, we\u2019ve built successful ones like Spotify. But they\u2019re not on a US scale.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hopsworks is among a small coterie of European companies trying to address the digital infrastructure deficit. In July this year, the European Commission threw its weight behind the issue with the publication of a roadmap aimed at \u201cpositioning open-source software as a central pillar of Europe\u2019s strategy to strengthen its technological autonomy\u201d from non-EU players. <\/p>\n

[\u00a0Is sovereign AI the answer for Ireland?Opens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

\u201cEurope has begun to build some private clouds, such as OVH in France and the Schwartz cloud in Germany, which is a start,\u201d Dowling says. \u201cThe second part of the infrastructure needed for AI are large language models where Google and Facebook dominate. But France is developing Mistral to compete, and president Macron has really put his weight behind it.<\/p>\n

\u201cChina doesn\u2019t run on US infrastructure. It built its own by regulating out the American cloud giants, giving its local companies \u2013 Alibaba, Tencent, WeChat \u2013 space to develop and compete globally. China protected its clouds, built its digital infrastructure internally through regulation and is now ready to compete globally, whereas Europe didn\u2019t protect anything. It built on American platforms and now we\u2019re paying the price.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dowling says the penny has begun to drop in Europe about the critical importance of strategic autonomy but not equally across the region. <\/p>\n

\u201cEvery French person knows what strategic autonomy is. So does every German person because their leaders talk about it quite frequently,\u201d he says. \u201cIn Ireland and other countries, it\u2019s head in the sand to avoid upsetting the transatlantic alliance. <\/p>\n

\u201cAirbus is the canonical example of what Europe needs now for digital sovereignty,\u201d Dowling adds. \u201cWhen Boeing threatened to dominate air travel, then the technology of the future, in the 1970s, Europe came together and started Airbus. One country was not big enough but, together, Europe built a competitor that has succeeded dramatically. Governments led this initiative back then, but now governments cower at interfering in the market economy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dowling has just written a book on AI systems. So, is it all his own work or did he get a little help from ChatGPT? \u201cChatGPT was useful for proofreading but not for thinking. The thinking and the construction are mine. Text should still be the product of original thought,\u201d he says. <\/p>\n

\u201cAI is useful for references and fact checking but large databases in the AI community are stochastic parrots \u2013 as in they\u2019re just repeating what they\u2019ve heard, as it were. There\u2019s still an ongoing debate as to whether they can actually generate new knowledge or just repeat what they\u2019ve learned.<\/p>\n

\u201cObviously they\u2019re very useful and will vastly change how we work. We\u2019re already seeing how they\u2019re changing computer programming by enabling companies like Hopsworks to help non-programmers build AI systems. <\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s a huge advance and a seismic shift for the software industry where products have traditionally been slow to develop and expensive to buy. AI cuts time and cost involved dramatically. Software is one of the first industries that will be revolutionised by AI. It will be a period of dislocation for many industries and a big challenge to redistribute the benefits of AI.\u201d <\/p>\n

CV<\/p>\n

Name: Jim Dowling<\/p>\n

Job: CEO and co-founder, Hopsworks<\/p>\n

Age: 51<\/p>\n

Lives: Central Stockholm<\/p>\n

Family: Married with three children, two sons aged 16 and 14 and a daughter aged seven<\/p>\n

Hobbies: In summer it\u2019s cycling and going out in our motorboat. In winter it\u2019s guitar and snowboarding. <\/p>\n

Something we might expect: Once an academic, always an academic. Dowling has recently written a book on AI systems<\/p>\n

Something that might surprise: He speaks four languages alongside English \u2013 Swedish, German, French, and Spanish <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When Jim Dowling began studying artificial intelligence in Trinity College in the early 1990s, few enough people knew…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":149776,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[220,218,219,84959,61,60,1859,80,15342],"class_list":{"0":"post-149775","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-chris-horn","12":"tag-ie","13":"tag-ireland","14":"tag-sweden","15":"tag-technology","16":"tag-trinity-college-dublin-tcd"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149775","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=149775"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149775\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/149776"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=149775"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=149775"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=149775"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}