A key aspect of the E.U.'s landmark AI Act could be watered down after the French, German, and Italian governments advocated for limited regulation of the powerful models--known as foundation models--that underpin a wide range of artificial intelligence applications. A document seen by TIME that was shared with officials from the European Parliament and the European Commission by the three biggest economies in the bloc over the weekend proposes that AI companies working on foundation models regulate themselves by publishing certain information about their models and signing up to codes of conduct. There would initially be no punishment for companies that didn't follow these rules, though there might be in future if companies repeatedly violate codes of conduct. They are some of the most powerful, valuable and potentially risky AI systems in existence. Many of the most prominent and hyped AI companies--including OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Anthropic, xAI, Cohere, InflectionAI, and Meta--develop foundation models.

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.

Generative AI chatbots unveiled by US tech firms have captivated the world with their spectacular successes and failures in engaging in conversations. But European firms focusing more on business applications are confident they won't be left in the dust in the rapidly developing field, even as they redouble their efforts. "The launch of ChatGPT has changed everything. It has been a wake-up call for European firms," said Laurent Daudet at French startup LightOn. "But the battle for generative AI isn't over," he added.

European AI leaders, Graphcore and Aleph Alpha will work together on research and deployment of Aleph Alpha's advanced multi-modal models on current IPU systems and the next-generation Good Computer, thanks to a new partnership between the two companies. Under the agreement, engineers and researchers from Graphcore and Aleph Alpha will work together to co-optimize their respective technologies for pre-training, fine-tuning, and inference of next generation multi-modal language and vision models. Aleph Alpha has received widespread acclaim for its highly versatile Luminous AI model with up to 200bn parameters, with its multi-modal functionality. Luminous enables unique opportunities for customers in a wide range of language and vision fields such as image recognition, knowledge management, document processing, text generation as well as powerful conversational AI applications. Graphcore's made-for-AI Intelligence Processing Unit (IPU) systems accelerate artificial intelligence workloads across industries as diverse as finance, physics, pharmacology, and meteorology.

As compelling as the leading large-scale language models may be, the fact remains that only the largest companies have the resources to actually deploy and train them at meaningful scale. For enterprises eager to leverage AI to a competitive advantage, a cheaper, pared-down alternative may be a better fit, especially if it can be tuned to particular industries or domains. That's where an emerging set of AI startups hoping to carve out a niche: by building sparse, tailored models that, maybe not as powerful as GPT-3, are good enough for enterprise use cases and run on hardware that ditches expensive high-bandwidth memory (HBM) for commodity DDR. German AI startup Aleph Alpha is one such example. Founded in 2019, the Heidelberg, Germany-based company's Luminous natural-language model boasts many of the same headline-grabbing features as OpenAI's GPT-3: copywriting, classification, summarization, and translation, to name a few.

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In this podcast, host Calvin Zito is joined by Sorin Cheran, VP and Fellow for HPE AI Strategy and Solutions, and Jonas Andrulis, CEO and founder of Aleph Alpha. Listen in to hear the latest on the next wave of AI.

In recent years machines have learned to generate passable snippets of English, thanks to advances in artificial intelligence. Now they are moving on to other languages. Aleph Alpha, a startup in Heidelberg, Germany, has built one of the world's most powerful AI language models. Befitting the algorithm's European origins, it is fluent not just in English but also in German, French, Spanish, and Italian. The algorithm builds on recent advances in machine learning that have helped computers handle language with what sometimes seems like real understanding.

We are excited to have co-led the € 23 million Series A financing round of Heidelberg-based Aleph Alpha together with our friends at Lakestar, UVC and existing investors LEA Partners, 468 Capital and Cavalry Ventures. The exceptional team around AI-serial-entrepreneur Jonas Andrulis and co-founder Samuel Weinbach research, develop and operationalise a new generation of huge and powerful AI like GPT-3, DALL-E or MuZero to maintain European sovereignty for Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Andrew Ng, one of the leading AI experts stated in 2017: "AI is the new electricity" -- but is it really? Today, narrow AI -- models that are trained to perform one very specific task like chess or solving equations on or above human level -- have automated the development of Covid-19 vaccines, autonomous driving, the creation of music, perfumes, and a lot more. Yes, AI has led to mind boggling results but to fully gauge its potential, I'd like to put things into context: If humanity would have existed an equivalent of 1 day (to represent 300k years) and electricity for 1 minute (to represent 200 years), then narrow AI would be around for about 5 seconds (representing less than two decades).