Europe wants its own Open AI. The bloc’s politicians are sick of regulating American tech giants from afar. They want Europe to build its own generative AI, which is why so many people are rooting for Jonas Andrulis, an easy-going German with a carefully pruned goatee.
Ask people within Europe’s tech bubble which AI companies they’re excited about and the names that come up most are Mistral, a French startup that has raised $100 million without releasing any products, and the company Andrulis founded, Aleph Alpha, which sells generative AI as a service to companies and governments and already has thousands of paying customers.
Skeptics in the industry question whether the company can really compete in the same league as Google and OpenAI, whose ChatGPT launched the current boom in generative AI. But many in the European Union are hoping that Aleph Alpha can counteract American dominance in what some believe will be an era-defining technology. The bloc has a long history of tussles over privacy and data security with US tech giants. Some Europeans feel the election of Donald Trump demonstrated how much their values have diverged from those of their counterparts in Washington DC. Others just don’t want to be passive observers with such an enormous economic opportunity at stake.
While Andrulis stresses that his company is not a “nationalist project”—there are plenty of Americans working at Aleph Alpha—he appears comfortable being at Europe’s vanguard. “I personally care a lot about helping Europe make a contribution beyond the cookie banner,” he says.
Now 41, Andrulis spent three years working on AI at Apple before leaving in 2019 to explore the technology’s potential outside the constraints of a big corporation. He set up Aleph Alpha in Heidelberg, a city in southwestern Germany. The company set to work building large language models, a type of AI that identifies patterns in human language in order to generate its own text or analyze huge numbers of documents. Two years later, Aleph Alpha raised $27 million, an amount that’s expected to be dwarfed by a new funding round Andriulis hints could be announced in the coming weeks.
Right now, the company’s clients—which range from banks to government agencies—are using Aleph Alpha’s LLM to write new financial reports, concisely summarize hundreds of pages, and build chatbots that are experts in how a certain company works. “I think a good rule of thumb is whatever you could teach an intern, our technology can do,” Andrulis says. The challenge, he says, is making the AI customizable so businesses using it feel in control and have a say in how it works. “If you’re a large international bank and you want to have a chatbot that is very insulting and sarcastic, I think you should have every right.”
But Andrulis considers LLMs just a stepping stone. “What we are building is artificial general intelligence,” he says. AGI, as it’s known, is widely seen as the ultimate aim of generative AI companies—an artificial, humanlike intelligence that can be applied to a wide range of tasks.
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