"The world changed," Jonas Andrulis, Aleph Alpha's chief executive, said in an interview. "Just having a European LLM is not sufficient as a business model. It doesn't justify the investment." He pointed to the consolidation of the field, and the expensive computing contest this set off, as factors behind his company's "evolution."
Aleph Alpha's new strategy centers around its latest product, PhariaAI, an "operating system for generative AI." It's effectively software to help corporate and government clients use AI chatbots and tools, regardless of whether the underlying technology was made by Aleph Alpha or its rivals.
The shift makes Aleph Alpha the latest high-flying AI startup to change course in a field increasingly controlled by a few well-capitalized giants. In the US, several prominent newcomers ditched ambitious plans after their founders took jobs at Microsoft, Google, and Amazon.
The startup still plans to develop large-language models, or LLMs, the systems that underpin products like ChatGPT, but they're no longer the centerpiece of its commercial strategy.
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