Aleph Alpha : German AI start-up on par with Open AI

“American tech companies dominate the market for AI models on which applications like ChatGPT are based. Now the German start-up Aleph Alpha has examined the performance of its own model - with encouraging results.

The ChatGPT software from the American company Open AI has been causing a sensation for almost three months. ChatGPT can use artificial intelligence (AI) to answer a wide variety of queries in a previously unknown to it. The tech companies Google and Microsoft, which is involved in Open AI, are now outdoing each other with new AI announcements almost every week. The focus is on the United States. 73 percent of the large AI models on which applications like ChatGPT are based come from America.

But with the start-up Aleph Alpha, there is at least one promising company in Germany that has already developed its own model called Luminous. The Heidelberg-based company has now comprehensively tested the performance of its AI for the first time and came to the conclusion that its own model can keep up with those of OpenAI, Meta and the open, international research model Bloom.

The company tested the models using a neutral test procedure from the open research and development community "Eleuther AI" with regard to the correct classification, evaluation and creation of texts and the answering of questions about specific text content. The procedure is also used by the other major providers to evaluate their software. According to the evaluation, the accuracy of the currently best model from Heidelberg is an average of 53.4 percent in the so-called core functions. For comparison: Open AI’s “davinci” model comes in at 53.7 percent, Meta’s OPT at 52.2 percent and Bloom at 49.3 percent.

"Important step towards Europe's technological sovereignty"

"Luminous is a strong alternative in many environments and thus an important step towards Europe's technological sovereignty," said the founder of Aleph Alpha, Jonas Andrulis. 

 

The start-up also emphasizes that Luminous achieves the results with significantly fewer parameters than the competition. Parameters are the values that the AI learns during its training and refines through further training. In fact, the Aleph Alpha model contains almost 70 billion such parameters. The compared competitor models all work with almost 175 billion parameters. According to the company, this enables Aleph Alpha to use less resources.

This can also be an economic advantage. Because the operation of large AI models requires a lot of computing power. Experts assume that each request to ChatGPT therefore costs around 5 cents. 

 

This is one of the reasons why Aleph Alpha does not offer a mass product for end customers, but has specialized in applications for companies and public administration. 

 

The company has built its own AI data center in Bayreuth for this purpose. 

 

In October 2022, for example, the “Lumi” citizen assistant, which is based on Luminous, was launched on behalf of the city of Heidelberg. The system is capable of responding to individual, non-preprogrammed questions from citizens.”