# Aleph Alpha

Aleph Alpha GmbH is a German artificial intelligence (AI) startup company founded by Jonas Andrulis and Samuel Weinbach. Beforehand, both founders had worked at companies like Apple and Deloitte.
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 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. The training of these models has been conducted in five European languages.

## 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; his thesis focused on artificial intelligence. His professional experience has included consulting at Deloitte and the founding of 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.
Weinbach, who holds a degree in business administration, worked at Deloitte from 2010; there, he established the Deloitte Analytic Institute, which focused on advancing corporate AI initiatives.

## Funding

* After securing €5.3 million in seed funding in 2020, Aleph Alpha raised an additional €23 million in a second round of financing in 2021, backed by several European venture capital firms.
* 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, SAP, Hubert Burda Media, Christ&Company Consulting, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise. The round raised a total of $500 million.

## Products
### Luminous

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. Along with the standard functionality all GPT models share, Aleph Alpha contributed some proprietary innovation:
* In 2021, they were the first team to offer multimodality, or 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.
* In 2022, they were the first team to develop the ability to create images based on multimodal input. This method has been published at NeurIPS 2023 under the name Multifusion.
* With an innovation called AtMan published at NeurIPS 2023, they 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.
As a tool to build and train its foundation models, the HPE Machine Learning Development System is used. Using the GPT-type concept allows for adaptation and fine-tuning of the foundation model to various applications.
Luminous is already used for the citizen information system, Lumi, for the city of Heidelberg.

## Partnerships

* 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, a collective of researchers working to increase accessibility to AI research.
* 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.