Luminous: How Europe is taking on the US in the race for Large Language Models?
Aleph Alpha has positioned Luminous as the “Europe’s most sophisticated AI base technology for your value creation”
This week several german news reported on BoschGPT, an AI language model similar to ChatGPT and developed by the german start up Aleph Alpha together with Bosch, the leading global technology and services supplier. The primary aim of this proprietary language model is to enhance efficiency within Bosch by simplifying internal processes and assisting developers by coding and documentation tasks. The rollout of BoschGPT is planned for the end of the year.
In contrast to many companies that relie on renowned large language models like OpenAI’s GPT-3 or GPT-4 and Google’s LaMDA to build their own model, Bosch has chosen to collaborate with Aleph Alpha, a new entrant in the generative AI field, to build BoschGPT. This model will be based on Aleph Alpha’s foundation models family Luminous. Despite not excluding potential collaborations with other partners to democratize the usage of AI-based products within the company, Bosch’s decision to partner with an European startup in a domain where US tech companies have seemingly dominated is interesting. The outcomes of this partnership will be surely highly monitored by other European firms
So why did Bosch opt for Luminous over establish models like GPT 3–4 or LaMDA, which have gained recognition and demonstrated capabilities
“Hey Bard, Between Luminous, LaMDA and GPT-4 what is the best LLM ?”
Bard’s response suggests that Luminous is comparable, if not superior to GPT-4 and LaMDA, at least on some features. Furthermore, Luminous models are multimodal and can process both text and images. Aleph Alpha has positioned Luminous as the “Europe’s most sophisticated AI base technology for your value creation”. This AI technology made in Europe aspires to ensure the digital sovereignty of the continent in the realm of emerging technologies. Aleph Alpha doesn’t view itself as a direct competitor of Google and Open AI. The start up’s strength lies in its research and development focus, targeting specific sectors where accurate and reliable information is essential to tackle complex business challenges.
In constrast to GPT-4 or LaMBDA which rely on unsupervised learning techniques involving internet data and human feedbacks for training and model optimization, Luminous models are trained through supervised learning on labeled data provided by their customers. One of the unique selling point of the company is its commitment to setting up foundations models on the client’s infrastructure, either in the cloud or on-premise. For clients willing to utilize Aleph Alpha’s cloud data center for model training and fine-tuning, the company’s infrastructure is based in Europe and operates under the European law. This becomes particularly significant considering the US Cloud Act’s implications, which allow US law enforcement agencies to access data stored by US comapnies in the cloud, regardless of geographical location and local data protection laws.
Additionally, Aleph Alpha collaborates closely with research institutes and universities, directly incorporating research findings into their foundation models. Last April, the company expanded all Luminous family models with a new optio called AtMan Explain. This feature addresses “Hallucination”, a major challenge of generative AI by tracing tracing correlations and factual correctness based on verified facts.It indicates text passages in a source that influenced or contradicted the generated answer; a substantial step in the field of explainable AI and a preemptive alignment with the anticipated requirements of the upcoming EU AI Act. This feature was developed with researchers from Aleph Alpha, TU Darmstadt, the Hessian.AI research center, and the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI).
Though unknown by the broad public, Aleph Alpha is well known in the artificial intelligence area. Its founder, Jonas Andrulis was previously senior manager at Apple and was supervising a team working on special and secret AI projects. He founded Aleph Alpha in 2019; the start up won the german AI award in 2021. Aleph Alpha mission is “to establish Europe as a critical player in artificial intelligence and safeguard its digital sovereignty” and its vision is “to be the leading European company researching and creating next-generation strong artificial intelligence.” Luminous is definitely a significant step towards reducing Europe’s dependence on US tech companies and actively participating in the race for generative AI leadership.
