Intuition, or also called sixth sense, has arrived in the Ukrainian war. The Swedish Defense Research Agency (FOI) has launched a platform called ‘Glimt’. This is a public project based on “crowd forecasting”, a method that uses the collective intelligence of participants to predict future events with very high precision.
In collaboration with Ukrainian authorities, ‘Glimt’, which in Swedish means flash, aims to help the Ukrainian army in the war. Its creator and director, Ivar Ekman, believes that just as a group of experts meets and reaches solutions, the same thing happens if “thousands and thousands and thousands of people put their ideas together, from which they draw even much more accurate conclusions,” as Miguel Pedrero explained in The rose of the winds.
The project, which has been in operation since January 2025, has been presented in Spain at the Swedish embassy in Madrid. Ambassador Per-Arne Hjelmborn has presented the results achieved this year, which demonstrate its good functioning: 55 questions analyzed with an overall correct result of 76%.
How it works and who can participate
The project is part of a military aid package from Sweden to Ukraine valued at more than one billion euros. The platform uses crowd prediction, also called crowd forecasting. Basically, it collects the information left by users and, with the help of artificial intelligence, generates future forecasts.
Can everyone participate or only Swedes? ‘Glimt’ is a platform open to all people from anywhere in the world. The user only has to search ‘Glimt’ on Google, create an account and answer a series of questions. Some of them are: When will Zelensky and Putin meet if they are going to do so? What are or how will the advances on the Eastern Front be throughout this year? How will global trends in support of Ukraine evolve?
The application’s algorithms are responsible for cross-referencing the data and evaluating the relevance and consistency of each response. The most accurate – whose level of success is discovered as time passes and whether what is asked is fulfilled or not – are the ones that have the most weight in the final result. From the entire bank of answers, Glimt creates forecasts, which help the Ukrainian army and its actions.
Users can also indicate the probability with which an event will occur.
Users, in addition to answering the questions, can assign the probability they believe there is that a certain event will occur and this is also analyzed by the algorithm. According to the data analyzed, every time users have marked that something was going to occur with a 40% probability, 40% of those events have ended up happening.
There are currently around 20,000 registered users and it is available in English and French, as well as Swedish. FOI has described the platform as “a new weapon” in the fight for Ukrainian freedom, which complements other material aid, such as Gripen aircraft or artillery.
Sweden joined NATO in 2024, after two centuries of neutrality
Notably, Sweden maintained a neutral position and did not join NATO until 2024, after formally requesting membership in 2022, a decision that was prompted by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Throughout these two years it has had to face vetoes from Türkiye and Hungary.
Sweden decided to declare itself neutral in any war conflict in 1834, a decision motivated after the War of 1814 against Norway and the Treaty of Kiel and the loss of strength as a power after the Thirty Years’ War. This position allowed him to avoid the consequences of the First and Second World Wars and the Cold War, although he secretly cooperated with the West for fear that the Social Union would invade Finland, its historical ally.
In 1995, Sweden became part of the European Union and in 2009 it signed a series of mutual defense treaties, which suggested that sooner rather than later it would end up joining NATO, a fact that finally happened on March 7, 2024.
