A new challenger to Open AI’s pole position in the large language model market has emerged in Germany.
Aleph Alpha, a startup company in the country, announced Monday that it has raised $500 million from Bosch, SAP and Hewlett Packard Enterprise in a round of series B funding.
That total is abnormally high for a series B round, which Aleph Alpha says it plans to spend on foundation model research, advanced product capabilities and commercialization of its software.
In addition to the enterprise IT giant SAP, which is based in Germany, Aleph Alpha received domestic investments from Schwarz Group and Christ&Company Consulting.
“With this latest investment, we will continue to enhance our capabilities and enable our partners to be at the forefront of this technological development,” CEO Jonas Andrulis said in a statement.
The company has already built its own large language models in what has become an artificial intelligence arms race between Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT)-backed Open AI, Google’s Bard and others.
Aleph Alpha focuses on the concept of “data sovereignty,” ie. the position that data stored in a country is subject to that country’s laws. This idea has gained popularity among European lawmakers, who may be wary of the data used to train AI models being subject to US laws.
Aleph Alpha’s training data, notably, includes public documents published by the European Parliament. As a result, its LLM can communicate in English, Spanish, Italian, German and French.
Meanwhile, Open AI will hold its first developer conference on Monday beginning at 10 am PT (1 pm ET).
Contact Andrew Kessel at andrew.kessel@proactiveinvestors.com
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