DM in AI 2025: Sometimes the simple solutions are just as good as the fancy ones

Team Powered by SmartFridge, made up of Oscar Thorsted Svendsen, Elias Lunøe, Viktor Larsen, Jonathan Tybirk, Lucas Pedersen, and Benjamin Banks, was named the winner of the 2025 Danish National AI Championship, the country’s largest AI competition for students.

The team earned the title by solving a healthcare evaluation challenge, where they built a system to assess the truthfulness of medical statements under tight time and memory constraints. While many teams opted for highly advanced and complex AI systems, Powered by SmartFridge chose a different path. They focused on a simpler, well-established method for searching and matching information. Their retrieval-augmented approach used BM25 indexing, optimised via Bayesian methods, and Gemma 3:27B for truthfulness evaluation. Their model achieved the highest accuracy in the task—demonstrating that simple, proven techniques can be just as effective, if not more so, than complex alternatives.

The Danish National AI Championship is a week-long hackathon where student teams develop AI solutions to real-world problems. Since its launch in 2021, the competition has grown into a central platform for emerging AI talent in Denmark and the Nordic region.

In a new format introduced this year, the top three teams were invited to present their solutions at the Danish Digitalization, Data Science and AI (D3A) conference, each showcasing how they approached one of the case challenges. The final decision and announcement of the winning team took place live at the event, creating a unique bridge between student innovation and the broader AI research and industry community.

The competition is co-organised by Ambolt AI, the Danish Data Science Academy (DDSA), and the Pioneer Centre for Artificial Intelligence, with support from partners across academia and industry. Together, they aim to foster hands-on learning, interdisciplinary collaboration, and the development of the next generation of AI professionals.