What does Aleph Alpha look like, the most advanced artificial intelligence in Europe that wants to compete with the big names in Silicon Valley?

It was in 2019 that German industrial engineer Jonas Andrulis founded with Samuel Weinbach nail to start up Dedicated to artificial intelligence (generative AI) that promises to rival the big companies in this technology like OpenAI.

This step has been taken after having strengthened his knowledge in the United States in the Apple offices where he worked for three years.

Back in his native Germany, He set out on his own path with a project he named Alpha Alpha which had its first headquarters in Heidelberg, a city located in the southwest of the country.

Andrulis’ proposal will Intended primarily for businesses and government agencies .

Aleph Alpha, which has been described as “German answer to ChatGPT” is based on the construction of large linguistic models (LLM).

This type of AI is capable of Identify patterns in human language to generate your own text or analyze huge amounts of data .

There to start up collection an amount of 27 million dollars two years after the start of your project according to the figures saved by Wired .

And currently, it is positioned as one of the major European bets to compete in the development of this technology a field currently led by American companies, such as OpenAI (responsible for systems such as ChatGPT, DALL-E and Sora).

Aleph Alpha’s main product is Luminous which presents itself as “a family of large language models”, which also has the capacity to work with images .

They were all trained to operate in five of the most widely spoken languages ​​in Europe : English, German, French, Italian and Spanish.

The company assures that it offers a large number of parameters and a high degree of efficiency in their operations.

According to statements by Andrulis published in February 2023, “systematic comparison of the best linguistic models shows that our team plays in the Champions League “.

“What our customers and partners also confirm based on their use cases can be demonstrated in the sum of the tests we have carried out: Luminous is a solid alternative in many environments and is therefore an important step towards the technological sovereignty of Europe,” stressed the CEO of Aleph Alpha.

Its clients range from banks to government agencies, which keep your system busy with tasks like writing financial reports, summarizing large amounts of documents, and creating specialized chatbots in the operation of certain companies.

However, Aleph Alpha’s goals go further .

“What we are building is artificial general intelligence (AGI) “Andrulis said in statements collected by Wired.

Generally speaking, the concept refers to the creation of an AI with self-learning capabilities, similar to that of humans .

It is therefore expected that he will be able to perform a wide variety of tasks for which they are not necessarily trained .

The company assured in 2023 that They attracted more than 10,000 customers with their proposition both private companies and government organizations.

German AI Association CEO Jörg Bienert told the aforementioned media: “This demand clearly shows that it really makes sense to develop and offer these types of models in Germany.” .

“Especially when it comes to government institutions that clearly want a solution to be developed and hosted in Europe “he added.

The signature also opened its first data center in Berlin in 2022 the German capital, with the aim of getting closer to customers focused on this field and security.

But one of the most striking points of Aleph Alpha’s AI is that has the ability to justify his decisions .

For example, Andrulis showed in a test that When you ask the system for a description of a character in a novel, you can click on each word to learn why the system included it in its response. .

He detailed that It also works with images so when you’re asked to describe one, you can click on part of your answer to have the AI ​​show you why you made that decision.

Check, He showed him a picture of a sunset and then pressed the phrase “sunset.” who delivered the model.

SO, the system showed a square around the part of the image where the sun was setting on the horizon.

The think tank’s executive director Future society Nicolas Moës, told the aforementioned media in August 2023 that the developers of Aleph Alpha “have begun experimenting with reliable AI features, such as the ability to explain” the origin of their answers .

However, Despite the excitement the firm has generated in Europe, he said the group of language models “is not the best out there.” . At least, until now.

Matthias Plappert, an AI consultant and former OpenAI researcher, added to his comment and said that “People want it to succeed, because there is a desire to have a European champion” .

In this sense, he told Wired that In several cases, “the quality of the company compared to the competition was exaggerated” .

The company nevertheless remains focused on its approach of “building excellent, transparent and controllable technology” ” assured Andrulis.