Meet the team building TwelveGPT
While many of you know me (David) from my tweeting about how cool TwelveGPT is and what it can do, you probably know less about the team who are building it. I thought it was time to put that right and introduce them.
Matthias (Language and Data Engineer)
Sometimes when you give someone a chance then they really exceed your expectations. This is exactly what happened with Matthias Green. He was a visiting student in Sweden and was looking for a job for a year-long work placement. Because he was only 20 years old and not finished with his studies, very few of the companies he applied to replied to his applications. But when he sent me his CV, and Marcus and I looked at his creative webpage, we thought that maybe he was worth taking a chance on. We wanted to do something different with TwelveGPT and he seemed to have that balance between being a skilled programmer and doing things creatively. It was a gamble that paid off. It took Matthias only a few days to understand what we were trying to do and within weeks he had built a prototype GPT commentator. Since then there has been no stopping him.
Johan (Head of User Experience)
Every successful project needs someone who takes responsibility for organising the work. And for Twelve, that is Johan Karlsson. He started in January, but soon found there were no established rules for how users interact with the language model approach we were taking. We are not simply building a scouting app, but a new way for staff at football clubs to interact with data. Johan responded to this challenge by taking on more responsibility: leading the project; redrawing all the visuals; creating a plan for Matthias work; finding ways to bring in the experience of the other data scientists; and making sure the random ideas I keep suggesting remain realistic and grounded. Designing TwelveGPT is designing a new way thinking, and this is exactly what Johan has done.
Agust, Ida, Nicole and Pegah (Data scientists)
If you have been following Twelve for a while, you will know about our approach of helping clubs with every aspect of how they work with data. We wanted to on use the excellent work they do, building models and communicating about data, into TwelveGPT. Agust got this idea from the start and designed the basic structure of our scouting qualities, as well as more recently implementing our career model. Nicole has worked with me on our transfer model. Ida has created the visuals for Twelve GPT match. And Pegah is implementing explainable expected goal and expected threat models. TwelveGPT is built from our knowledge and experience in football.
David, Sarthak, Isak and Malek (Prompt Engineers)
In order to get TwelveGPT to say sensible things about data we needed people to do a job that had only just been invented: the prompt engineer. For Twelve, the job involves translating algorithmic generated texts about statistics to football insight. Malek Shafei was our first prompt engineer, starting in the summer of 2023. Since then, David Laszlo, Sarthak Dev and Isak Wahlberg have taken over what they agreed was “the most challenging thing they have ever done”. It isn’t easy. But these guys have done an amazing job making TwelveGPT come to life.
Jernej (Head of Data)
Twelve GPT has grown from the unique approachTwelve have to data. An approach developed by Jernej Flisar over the last three years, through his work helping clubs with novel metrics which measure particular skills. While Jernej continues to work with clubs, for TwelveGPT he has taken a background role, making sure the metrics are calculated properly and the data is always up to date.
