Aleph Alpha GmbH, a German startup focused on developing large language models, today announced that it has closed a Series B funding round worth more than $500 million. 

Bosch Ventures jointly led the investment with Ipai and Schwarz Group. Ipai operates an artificial intelligence-focused business park in the German city of Heilbronn, while the Schwartz Group is the parent company of supermarket chain Lidl. Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co., SAP SE and several other institutional investors participated as well.

Aleph Alpha offers a large language model family called Luminous that comprises three neural networks. They feature 13 billion, 30 billion and 70 billion parameters, respectively. Aleph Alpha’s website indicates that it also plans to develop more advanced language models with up to 300 billion parameters.

The three models that currently make up the Luminous series can process text in English, German, French, Italian and Spanish, as well as take images as input. Aleph Alpha says that they lend themselves to a variety of tasks ranging from text generation to sorting documents by topic. The company makes its language models available through an application programming interface that developers can integrate into their software.

Aleph Alpha ships all three of its models with a built-in AI explainability tool. According to the company, the tool can help customers ensure the models process their data reliably.

The Luminous series is based on the popular Transformer neural network architecture. When a Transformer-powered model takes text as input, it breaks down the text into individual words and prioritizes them by perceived importance. The greater the importance that the AI attributes to a word, the more the word influences its output.

Aleph Alpha’s explainability tool makes it possible to manually change the importance a Luminous model attributes to different parts of a user prompt. By observing how the changes influence the model’s output, engineers can gain insights into its processing workflow. Those insights, in turn, make it easier to determine whether the AI processes input data reliably.

Aleph Alpha will invest the proceeds from its new funding round in model development and commercialization initiatives. Additionally, it will work with investor Bosch to support the latter company’s internal AI initiatives. The industrial equipment maker said that it plans to adopt Aleph Alpha’s technology in both employee- and customer-facing software initiatives.

“Our partners are industry leaders who offer enormous potential for innovation and scaling, and we are committed to building these partnerships to leading positions in their respective industries,” said founder and Chief Executive Officer Jonas Andrulis.

Aleph Alpha’s funding round comes a few months after rival Mistral AI raised $113 million from former Google LLC Chief Executive Eric Schmidt and other backers. The Paris-based startup will use the capital to develop a series of large language models for text and code generation use cases. Mistral AI’s first model, Mistral 7B, became available in September under an open-source license. 

Image: Aleph Alpha