ChatGPT competitor Aleph Alpha has received investment from a consortium such as Bosch

Original source: AIGC Open Community

Image source: Generated by Unbounded AI

On November 7, generative AI platform Aleph Alpha announced on its official website that it had received more than $500 million (about 3.6 billion yuan) in Series B financing. This time, Bosch Ventures, Schwarz Group, SAP, Hewlett-Packard and other well-known consortiums participated in the investment.

Aleph Alpha has developed its own large language model Luminous series, which contains 13 billion, 30 billion and 70 billion parameters, and the performance is equivalent to GPT-3. The functions are similar to ChatGPT, providing services such as generating text/code, summarizing content, translating, and more.

Aleph Alpha said that with the new funding will accelerate product innovation, a 300 billion parameter Luminous-World model is currently being developed, which can rival OpenAI’s GPT-4. Product security and data privacy are the core cornerstones of R&D, which will provide secure and controllable AI services for enterprises and individual users.

As one of the industrial powers, Germany has emerged a large number of world-class enterprises such as Siemens, BMW, Volkswagen, Bayer, and Robert Bosch. But in the field of AI, especially generative AI, it is significantly lagging behind other countries.

In order to catch up with the pace of AI change and build their own “OpenAI”, they pinned their hopes on the new generation of AI unicorns such as Aleph Alpha, which is why many German consortia participated in this investment.

According to public information, Aleph Alpha was founded in January 2019 and is headquartered in Heidelberg, Germany. Aleph received 100 million euros on June 30 this year and was officially promoted to the German AI unicorn.

In terms of products, Aleph Alpha released the first large language model of the Luminous series in April 2022, with three parameters: 13 billion, 30 billion and 70 billion.

These models have achieved good results in various text classification, common sense reasoning, and natural language reasoning, among others, in the tests of the well-known Eleuther AI.

An example of an Aleph Alpha product

Currently, all three models can handle text in English, German, French, Italian, and Spanish, and support image input. It is suitable for a variety of tasks from text/code generation, content summarization, translation, etc., and provides an API interface to help developers integrate models into their own applications.

Generated content explainability is a technical highlight of the Aleph Alpha model, and Aleph Alpha said that all three of its models have built-in AI interpretation capabilities that can help customers ensure that their models process their data safely and reliably, and that the generated content is properly interpreted.

In addition, it is possible to manually change the weight assignment of the Luminous model to individual parts of the user prompt. By observing how these changes affect the model’s output, developers can drill down into its processing process to see if AI-generated content is fake, illegal, or otherwise illegal.

According to Schwarz co-CEO Rolf Schumann, Aleph Alpha will shape the future of generative AI and set new standards for this critical technology. Aleph Alph is a perfect fit for the positioning of our cloud and cybersecurity products and helps us further optimize our digital services."

Tanja Rückert, Member of the Board of Management and Chief Digital Officer at Bosch, said that the active development of generative AI is essential for Europe’s technological sovereignty. We are excited to work with Aleph Alpha on the development and commercialization of generative AI applications."