Aleph Alpha

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Aleph Alpha GmbH
Company typePrivate
IndustryArtificial intelligence
Founded2019; 5 years ago (2019)
Founders
  • Jonas Andrulis
  • Samuel Weinbach
HeadquartersHeidelberg, Germany
ProductsLuminous LLM
Websitealeph-alpha.com

Aleph Alpha is an independent German artificial intelligence (AI) startup company in Heidelberg, founded by professionals with experience as employees of Apple, SAP and Deloitte.[1] Aleph Alpha attempts to provide a full-stack souvereign technology stack for generative AI, independent from US companies and comply with European data protection regulations and the AI Act. It built one of the most powerful AI clusters[2] inside its own data centre and develops large language models (LLM), which try to provide transparency of its sources used for the results generated[3] and are intended for enterprises and governmental agencies only. Training of its model has been done in five European languages.[4]

History[edit]

Aleph Alpha Founder & CEO Jonas Andrulis at DLD 2023

Aleph Alpha has been founded 2019 by the serial entrepreneur Jonas Andrulis and Samuel Weinbach. Jonas Andrulis received his academic economics engineering degree from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology with a thesis in AI. He worked in consulting at Deloitte and started several AI software companies. Before starting Aleph Alpha he worked as AI R&D engineering manager position at Apple's Special Projects Group and with Siri AI R&D working on classified research.[5] Samuel Weinbach received a degree in business administration and was with Deloitte consulting from 2010 building the Deloitte Analytic Institute that was focused on spearheading corporate AI initiatives.[1]

Funding[edit]

  • After receiving 5 million in seed money in 2020,[6] a second round of financing by several European venture-capital companies totaled 23 million Euro in 2021.[7]
  • In a financing round in November 2023, German companies Schwarz Gruppe and Dieter Schwarz Foundation with the Innovation Park Artificial Intelligence (IPAI) participated as the co-lead investors, along with Bosch[8] together with SAP, Hubert Burda Media and Christ&Company Consulting as well as US-Hewlett Packard Enterprise. The total amount of this third round was more than 500 million US dollars.[9][10]

Products[edit]

Luminous[edit]

Aleph Alpha developed its own AI language model, named Luminous, based on its own research and codebase with the architecture of generative pre-trained transformers (GPT) with self-supervised learning. Next to the standard functionality all GPT models share Aleph Alpha contributed some proprietary innovation:

  • They were the first team to offer multimodality in 2021[11] - the ability to prompt their models with any combination of text and images. The innovation behind this capability was published at the leading AI conference EMNLP 2022 and open-sourced under the name MAGMA.[12]
  • In 2022 they were the first team to develope the ability to create images based on multimodal input.[13] This method has been published at NeurIPS 2023 under the name Multifusion.[14]
  • With an innovation called AtMan published at NeurIPS 2023 Aleph Alpha developed a method to make the patters learned by GPT models to create results visible and controllable. This methods addressed the problem that generative AI had been a black box before. It created interest from enterprises and governments to address complex and critical problems where chatbots are sometimes insufficient, making AI generated results more trustworthy.[15][16]

As a tool to build and train its foundation models, the HPE Machine Learning Development System is used.[17] Using the GPT-type concept allows adaptation and fine-tuning of the foundation model to various applications.[18]

Luminous is already used for the citizen information system Lumi of the city of Heidelberg.[19]

Partnerships[edit]

  • For R&D, Aleph Alpha is working with the University of Duisburg-Essen and the Technical University of Darmstadt. It is also participating in open-source organizations such as EleutherAI, a collective of researchers working to increase accessibility to AI research.[4]
  • Both Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and SAP have entered non-exclusive partnerships with Aleph Alpha. In the case of HPE, it is the first partnership of this kind. HPE will offer Luminous on its Greenlake platform.[20]

See also[edit]

References[edit]

  1. ^ a b Chatbot-Konkurrenz aus Deutschland: Auf Wiedersehen, ChatGPT - und willkommen Aleph Alpha. finanzen.net, 2023-03-15 (in German). Retrieved 2023-11-10.
  2. ^ Schreiner, Maximilian (2022-09-16). "OpenAI competitor Aleph Alpha launches Europe's fastest commercial AI data center". THE DECODER. Retrieved 2024-04-14.
  3. ^ Maximilian Schreiner: AI in practice: AI startup Aleph Alpha shows off latest LLMs with a unique feature. The Decoder, 2023-06-05. Retrieved 2023-11-11
  4. ^ a b Accelerating Europe’s multilingual AI revolution. Hewlett Packard Enterprise, 2022. Retrieved 2023-11-11.
  5. ^ Systems, Eulerpool Research. "L'histoire de réussite de Jonas Andrulis sous les projecteurs". Eulerpool Research Systems (in French). Retrieved 2024-04-14.
  6. ^ Tucker, Charlotte (2021-01-27). "Heidelberg-based Aleph Alpha raises €5.3 million to lead "Made in Europe" AI development". EU-Startups. Retrieved 2024-04-14.
  7. ^ Earlybird leads Aleph Alpha's 23 million EURO Serie A for the largest European AI models. press release, earlybird.com, 2021-07-27. Retrieved 2023-11-11.
  8. ^ Generative AI Investments Aleph Alpha, Anthropic and Cohere. SAP news, 2023-07-18. Retrieved 2023-11-11.
  9. ^ Aleph Alpha raises a total investment of more than half a billion US Dollars from a consortium of industry leaders and new investors. Press Release, aleph-alpha.com, 2023-11-06. Retrieved 2023-11-11.
  10. ^ Aggi Cantrill and Mark Bergen: German Giants Pour Over $500 Million Into AI Startup Aleph Alpha. Bloomberg News, 2023-11-06. Retrieved 2023-11-11.
  11. ^ online, heise (2021-11-18). "KI-Modell kann Bilder beschreiben: Aleph Alpha ist Vorreiter für multimodale KI". Developer (in German). Retrieved 2024-04-14.
  12. ^ online, heise (2022-03-16). "GPT-3 überflügeln: Quellcode des KI-Modells MAGMA steht auf GitHub". Developer (in German). Retrieved 2024-04-14.
  13. ^ online, heise (2022-12-09). "KI-Bildsynthese: M-VADER erstellt Bilder aus beliebigen Text- und Bildvorgaben". Developer (in German). Retrieved 2024-04-14.
  14. ^ "Aleph Alpha Forschungen: NeurIPS Highlights – ainfach.ai" (in German). 2023-12-08. Retrieved 2024-04-14.
  15. ^ Schreiner, Maximilian (2023-06-05). "AI startup Aleph Alpha shows off latest LLMs with a unique feature". THE DECODER. Retrieved 2024-04-14.
  16. ^ "Handelsblatt". www.handelsblatt.com. Retrieved 2024-04-14.
  17. ^ Hewlett Packard Enterprise accelerates AI journey from POC to production with new solution for AI development and training at scale. Press Release, HPE, 2022-04-27. Retrieved 2023-11-11.
  18. ^ Next-level customizability. aleph-alpha.com. Retrieved 2023-11-11.
  19. ^ KI-Bürgerassistenz Lumi. heidelberg.de, 2023 (in German). Retrieved 2023-11-11.
  20. ^ Matthias Hohensee: Wir verbünden uns mit den besten Unternehmen der Welt. In: WirtschaftsWoche, 2023-06-22 (in German). Retrieved 2023-11-11.

External links[edit]

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