German AI specialist Aleph Alpha has introduced Pharia AI, a comprehensive software stack designed to help enterprises and government agencies develop and operate AI applications with confidence and future proofing.
According to founder Jonas Andrulis, the goal is to provide customers with a complete solution for developing AI applications from the initial concept to production deployment.
Pharia AI is made up of several components:
- Pharia Catch assists subject matter experts in structuring and storing their knowledge for AI development.
- Pharia Studio guides developers through the process of creating application-specific AI systems from this knowledge and pre-trained models.
- Pharia OS handles the operation and scaling of these systems, including access control and monitoring.
- The Pharia Assistant provides a simple interface for employees to utilize the AI functions.
Aleph Alpha stresses that the stack should offer customers sovereignty and future security. The systems can be flexibly operated in the cloud or on-premises and trained with their own data. Additionally, customers should always have access to the latest AI innovations, whether open source models or Aleph Alpha's own developments.
These innovations include a method that allows language models to be more efficiently adapted to new languages and specialist areas without compromising performance in the source languages. Such innovations stem from Aleph Alpha's collaboration with researchers, such as those at the Technical University of Darmstadt. The company is also working on a way for customers to refine the behavior of the language models themselves and offers Explainable AI functions. All Pharia AI features are set to roll out in the coming months, with some already being used by select customers.
Alongside the core stack, the company also provides industry-specific solutions for sectors like the public sector, banks, and insurance companies. One example is Creance AI, a joint venture with PwC that helps financial institutions automatically check contracts for regulatory requirements.
Aleph Alpha sees partners as a key success factor for the dissemination of its technology. Platinum partners like IT service provider Materna and PwC support customers in the implementation of AI projects based on Pharia AI.
New Pharia-1-LLM language models published
Coinciding with the launch of the Pharia 1 language model family, which comprises 7 billion parameters, Aleph Alpha has also published new basic models, including training code and detailed information on data and capabilities. Pharia-1-LLM-7B-control can be flexibly adapted to user preferences, while the model behavior of Pharia-1-LLM-7B-control-aligned has been optimized for dealing with sensitive topics. Both models are trained in seven languages, with special optimization for English, German, French, and Spanish. The models are tailored to short, concise answers and - according to Aleph Alpha - are on par with the latest open source language models in the 7 to 8 billion parameter range. According to Aleph Alpha, they have been fully trained in accordance with applicable EU and national laws, making them suitable for corporate use.
Chief Research Officer Yasser Jadidi states that model size is not the decisive factor, and efficiency and domain-specific optimization are more important. However, the company is not ruling out the possibility of offering larger models in the future. The Pharia-1 models are available on Hugging Face.
Aleph Alpha aims to establish a new industry standard for sovereign AI with Pharia AI, Andrulis said. He sees his company as the only European startup free from strategic restrictions imposed by investors, allowing it to consistently drive innovation and transparency. In the past, he said, potential investors have sometimes demanded that less technology be freely shared or that customers be restricted in their choice of hardware, such as specific GPUs. Aleph Alpha did not want to compromise on openness and flexibility, Andrulis said. Instead, the company has built a stable funding and shareholder structure that allows it to maintain its own values over the long term.
According to the company, it had raised a total of 470 million euros in November 2023, consisting of 110 million euros in equity financing, 300 million euros in research financing for the new subsidiary Aleph Alpha Research, and 60 million euros in order commitments. At the time of signing, this corresponded to more than 500 million US dollars. The communication of the financing in November was criticized a few weeks ago, as this breakdown was not communicated.
