European AI Hope Sounds Alarm: ‘Existential Danger’ Ahead!

Aleph Alpha, Europe’s aspiring competitor to OpenAI, has reportedly secured nearly 500 million euros ($534 million) from investors this week. However, the co-founder of the start-up expressed concerns on Friday, stating that the company is currently fighting for its mere existence.

A coalition of investors, including Lidl’s owner Schwarz Group, Bosch, SAP and Hewlett Packard Enterprises, pumped 467 million euros into the German artificial intelligence company this week.

Before the cash investment, the capital of the 60-employee company, founded in 2019, was only 28 million euros.

But Jonas Andrulis, the company’s founder, told Handelsblatt the extent of the challenges they faced.

“The moment I saw that OpenAI got another 13 billion, I knew we were in existential danger,” Andrulis said in an interview published Friday.

But since ChatGPT was launched by Microsoft-backed OpenAI about a year ago, there’s been fierce competition for market share between big tech majors like Google and Meta.

“Microsoft realized that nothing is more important than technology, and they decided to become dominant,” said Andrulis, adding that OpenAI essentially “threatens our existence.”

Given US supremacy, “let’s not kid ourselves – the task of European technological sovereignty is against the odds,” said the former Apple engineer.

Aleph Alpha specializes in generative artificial intelligence, software that can produce text, images or other media that looks like it was created by humans.

Much of what it also drives is data sovereignty, or data protection, an issue raised by the rise of state-sponsored cyber-espionage or hacking.

The company also gets an extra boost from the cooperation with the Heilbronn Artificial Intelligence Innovation Center, which is supported by Lidl’s founder Dieter Schwarz’s foundation.