New Alpha of AI Explained

Exploring European AI scene

Today, everyone - even their cat - knows about OpenAI and ChatGPT. In reality, there are many more powerful applications for AI. Let’s discuss the next AI champion, Aleph Alpha, which is gaining significant visibility in the European AI scene.

Behind Breakthroughs

Aleph Alpha is developing a family of LLMs called Luminous. These guys are quite famous in the academia scene. They've published some of the most significant papers in the field and have logged several breakthroughs. For example, the Aleph Alpha team invented multi-modality (in early 2022) and recently explainability that helps to comprehend and explain how a model ends up with a certain result.

They've even built this one AI system, which, according to Aleph Alpha’s CEO and Founder, Jonas Andrulis, can be considered conscious.

Aleph Alpha raised $500 million in a Series B round, making it the biggest AI funding round in Europe ever. By now, they've backed by Bosch, SAP, Intel, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, etc. What’s their secret sauce? Their sweet spot is using AI to optimize and streamline business processes in finance, legal, healthcare, and manufacturing. For more insights into Aleph Alpha’s technology, check out our discussion with Aleph Alpha's Founder and CEO Janus Andrulis.

If you are wondering why not everyone is talking about them yet, it’s because, unlike OpenAI, which is also working B2C, Aleph Alpha is focusing on B2B only, meaning it focuses on providing services to other companies. If you want to try it out, Aleph Alpha’s playground is different (it’s not as straightforward as ChatGPT’s), and the business model is different. They license their models to big enterprises like Bosch, HP, and help them fine-tune the model on their data.

Mistral AI

Besides Aleph Alpha, another booming EU-based startup to watch is Mistral AI. It was founded less than a year ago by former Deepmind and Meta employees. By now, it has already become a unicorn. They believe in open-source AI and have publicly released their latest technology to the community so others can build chatbots and other AI-driven products on top of it.

For me, it will be interesting to watch what will happen with investments in AI. Because last year, $100 million-dollar rounds in AI became routine, but will this trend, all this excitement, and FOMO around AI continue in 2024? I’m looking forward to reading your thoughts in the comments below.

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