Aleph Alpha
German artificial intelligence company
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Aleph Alpha GmbH is a German artificial intelligence (AI) startup company which develops large language models (LLM) which provide transparency of its sources used for the results generated.[2] The company caters to enterprises and governmental agencies only.
 | |
| Company type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Artificial intelligence |
| Founded | 2019 |
| Founders |
|
| Headquarters | Heidelberg, Germany |
| Products | Luminous LLM |
Number of employees | 51-200[1] (2024) |
| Website | aleph-alpha |
History
Aleph Alpha was founded in 2019 by Jonas Andrulis and Samuel Weinbach.[3][4] After securing €5.3 million in seed funding in 2020,[5] Aleph Alpha raised an additional €23 million in a second round of financing in 2021, backed by several European venture capital firms.[6] In 2021, Aleph Alpha offered multimodality,[7] the ability to prompt their models with any combination of text and images.[8] In 2022, the company developed the ability to create images based on multimodal input[9] (NeurIPS 2023: Multifusion).[10]
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,[11] SAP, Hubert Burda Media, Christ&Company Consulting, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise. The round raised a total of $500 million.[12][13] The amount of a 500 million dollar financing round publicly communicated by Aleph Alpha appeared to be significantly higher than the funds actually raised.[14] Research by the trade press subsequently revealed that only 110 million euros of the total volume was genuine equity financing. A further 300 million euros had flowed into research funding for the company subsidiary Aleph Alpha Research, as well as 60 million euros in the form of order commitments.[15] Meanwhile, the internal sales target of 6 million US dollars for 2023 had not been achieved: According to the 2023 financial statements, the company had not even been able to show a turnover of one million euros, while the loss amounted to 18.9 million euros.[16]
Description
Aleph Alpha developed its own AI language model, Luminous, based on its own research and codebase with the architecture of generative pre-trained transformers (GPT) and self-supervised learning. Its method makes patterns learned by GPT models visible and controllable, addressing the "black box" problem of generative AI.[17][18] As a tool to build and train its foundation models, the HPE Machine Learning Development System is used.[19]
Customers include the citizen information system, Lumi, for the city of Heidelberg.[20]
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.[21] Both Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and SAP have entered non-exclusive partnerships with Aleph Alpha.[22]