Aleph Alpha

Aleph Alpha is a German technology company known for its collection of autoregressive (causal, decoder-only) transformer large language models (LLMs) under the Luminous series. The Luminous series includes three primary models: 

1.Luminous-Base, the smallest model in the Luminous family with 13 billion parameters (15 billion with multimodality) prioritizes tasks such as classification and labeling, and supports multimodal input capabilities to handle prompts consisting of a combination of images and text.

2.Luminous-Extended, with 30 billion parameters (42 billion with multi-modality), excels in tasks such as information extraction and language simplification. It also supports multimodal input capabilities (images and text). 

3.Luminous-Supreme, with 70 billion parameters, excels in all natural language tasks and is particularly well-suited for creative text generation and tasks requiring deep text understanding.

The Luminous models have been trained on a dataset that includes web crawls, books, political and legal sources, Wikipedia, news articles, and other specialized datasets. It was also trained on five of the most commonly spoken European languages: English, German, French, Italian, and Spanish.

Aleph Alpha provides access to these models through its API and playground and offers options for on-premise installations or AI-as-a-service. It prioritizes ethical use and transparency and offers explainability features for understanding model outputs. Additionally, Aleph Alpha claims to emphasize environmental responsibility by powering its data center with 100% renewable energy.

Key customers and partnerships 

As of August 2023, the platform served 10,000 customers across both business and government.

In June 2022, the company partnered with Graphcore, which specializes in AI hardware and software, to jointly advance the research, development, and deployment of advanced multimodal AI models by leveraging Graphcore's hardware acceleration and Aleph Alpha's Luminous AI model for various applications across industries. In August 2023, Aleph Alpha partnered with Innovation Park Artificial Intelligence (Ipai), an initiative focused on strengthening Germany's position in AI, to enhance AI development, promote ethical AI research and application, and establish a platform for applied AI in Europe to strengthen digital sovereignty and competitiveness.

Funding and financials 

In November 2023, Aleph Alpha raised USD 500 million in a Series B funding round. Major participants in this round were Bosch, SAP, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, along with Schwarz Group, Christ&Company Consulting, Park Artificial Intelligence, and Burda Principal Investments. The new capital was anticipated to fund Aleph Alpha's research on foundation models. Moreover, it intended to utilize the funds for broadening its product capabilities and commercialization efforts.