Artificial intelligence
Heidelberg AI start-up claims technical breakthrough
Text robots like ChatGPT have a systematic weakness in terms of transparency. The Heidelberg AI start-up Aleph Alpha is now claiming the technical breakthrough. photo
© Richard Drew/AP/dpa
The hype is huge, everyone is talking about AI. But there are big question marks when it comes to trustworthiness and transparency. A Baden-Württemberg start-up has now taken an important step.
According to its own statements, the Heidelberg AI start-up Aleph Alpha has for the first time reached a milestone on the way to artificial intelligence that is correct in terms of content, explainable and trustworthy. An extension of the in-house language model Luminous, which is available from today, is able to understand connections in information and factual correctness on the basis of verified facts, the company said on Thursday. At the same time, the system is able to show which text passages in a source caused the generated answer or which contradict it.
If the information provided by Aleph Alpha is confirmed in independent tests, the Heidelberg company would have taken an important step towards eradicating a systematic weakness in text robots such as ChatGPT. So far it has often not been clear why a ChatGPT actually writes what it writes. Users also complain that systems like ChatGPT provide false facts.
The topic of “explainable AI” (“Explainable AI” or XAI for short) has also occupied scientists who want to make AI more transparent for some time. The feature, launched on Friday, is based on Aleph Alpha’s latest research published academically earlier this year dubbed AtMan.
The transparency and traceability of AI-generated content will “enable the use of generative AI for critical tasks in the legal, healthcare and banking sectors,” said company founder Jonas Andrulis. With its AI project, Aleph Alpha is a beacon of hope in the German software industry. In contrast to the major US competitors OpenAI, Microsoft and Google, the Baden-Württemberg company does not offer its own platform on which the system can be tried out directly. However, Luminous can be reached indirectly via customers of Aleph Alpha, for example via the “Lumi” citizen information system of the city of Heidelberg.