Germanys Aleph Alpha has raised over $500 million in a Series B round backed by Bosch and SAP among other new investors, as the startup looks to build on its promise to be the leading provider of sovereign generative AI applications in Europe, taking on OpenAI and the hyperscalers. Aleph Alpha, founded by former Apple AI researcher Jonas Andrulis, has created the Luminous series of large language models (it has promised a 300 billion parameter Luminous World model later this year) which are commercially available for customers now, via a Python client. Working with partner Graphcore, it has demonstrated some impressive AI compute efficiency progress as well as capabilities with a privacy and explainability focus (see for example its Atman paper of earlier in 2023.) The Series B funding, it said in a press release on Monday, strengthens the foundation for Aleph Alpha to further advance its proprietary AI research, accelerate development and commercialization of Generative AI for the most complex and critical applications such as in data sensitive industries like healthcare, finance, law, government and security.

Last week was an important moment in the debate about AI, with President Biden issuing an executive order and the UKs AI Safety Summit convening world leaders. Much of the buzz around these events made it sound like AI presents us with a binary choice: unbridled optimism, or existential fear