German startup aims to become 'Europe's OpenAI' The German st | Gradient Dude

German startup aims to become "Europe's OpenAI"

The German startup Aleph Alpha, which is based in Heidelberg, Germany (the city where I did my PhD), recently raised $ 27M in a Series A round. The task, they set themselves ambitious (even too much) - they want to create another breakthrough in AI, something similar to OpenAI GPT-3.

The company was founded in 2019, and, strangely, I discovered it only today. I looked at their ML team. And I have not found a single person with any major scientific achievements (say on the level of Professor). I got disappointed. Their ML team includes 3 recent PhD students and Connor Leahy, who is known for co-founding EleutherAI. EleutherAI is a non-profit organization that was created to reproduce and open-source GPT-3 model. Perhaps they bet on Connor, but, frankly speaking, Connor is not a researcher, he has no scientific publications, and EleutherAI is simply reproducing results of OpenAI. When OpenAI was founded, it was immediately clear that they got a stellar team, which would certainly produce something cool.

My impressions are controversial. Aleph Alpha has partnerships with German government agencies. They promote themselves in the style of "we are Europe's last chance claim a place in the field of AI", "we will be based purely in Europe and will be pushing European values and ethical standards." They also promise to be more open than OpenAI (lol) and commit to open-source. Although, perhaps, they will just create some kind of large platform with AI solutions and sit on the government funding. It will be a kind of AI consulting, they even have a job posted on their website for this purpose - AI Delivery & Consulting. The whole affair smacks of a government cover-up like in the case of Palantir (at least partially).

I'm not a startup expert, but it seems like Europe is very hungry for innovation. They want to keep up with the United States and China. Therefore, they give out the bucks at the first opportunity, especially if the company promises to work closely with the government. What do you think about this, gentlemen?