Aleph Alpha GmbH is a German artificial intelligence (AI) startup company founded by Jonas Andrulis and Samuel Weinbach, both of whom have professional experience at companies such as Apple and Deloitte.[2] Based in Heidelberg, the company aims to develop a sovereign technology stack for generative AI that operates independently of U.S. companies and complies with European data protection regulations, including the Artificial Intelligence Act. Aleph Alpha has established reportedly one of the most powerful AI clusters within its own data center,[3] and specializes in developing large language models (LLM). These models are designed to provide transparency regarding the sources used for generating results and are intended for use by enterprises and governmental agencies.[4] The training of these models has been conducted in five European languages.[5]
CEO Jonas Andrulis
History
Aleph Alpha was founded in 2019 by Jonas Andrulis and Samuel Weinbach. Andrulis holds a degree in economics engineering from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, where his thesis focused on artificial intelligence. His professional experience includes consulting at Deloitte and founding several AI software companies. Prior to founding Aleph Alpha, he served as an AI R&D engineering manager at Apple's Special Projects Group and worked on classified research with Siri AI R&D.[6] Weinbach, who holds a degree in business administration, worked at Deloitte from 2010, where he was involved in establishing the Deloitte Analytic Institute, which focused on advancing corporate AI initiatives.[2]
Funding
After securing €5.3 million in seed funding in 2020,[7] Aleph Alpha raised an additional €23 million in a second round of financing in 2021, backed by several European venture capital firms.[8]
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[9] 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.[10][11]
Products
Luminous
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[12] - 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.[13]
In 2022 they were the first team to develop the ability to create images based on multimodal input.[14] This method has been published at NeurIPS 2023 under the name Multifusion.[15]
With an innovation called AtMan published at NeurIPS 2023 Aleph Alpha developed a method to make the patterns 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.[16][17]
As a tool to build and train its foundation models, the HPE Machine Learning Development System is used.[18] Using the GPT-type concept allows adaptation and fine-tuning of the foundation model to various applications.[19]
Luminous is already used for the citizen information system Lumi of the city of Heidelberg.[20]
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.[21]
