How the World Plans to Stop American AI Domination

Founders usually create startups to make money for themselves and their investors—or to change the world and protect humanity, as some of them say in their more grandiose moments. For Aleph Alpha, an artificial intelligence startup in Germany, those things mattered too, but its founders had another, more tribal motivation: to make sure Europe doesn’t get left in the dust by a hegemonic U.S. AI industry.

For Jonas Andrulis, CEO of Aleph Alpha, that concern got a lot more real in November 2022 when OpenAI released ChatGPT, its AI chatbot. At that point, the three-year-old German startup had raised over $33 million and had released an early multimodal large-language model, which could understand both images and text. Both achievements had put Aleph Alpha on the map, but the delirium that greeted ChatGPT threatened to overshadow everything Aleph was doing.

“All hell broke loose, and people kept raising billions,” recalled Andrulis. “Of course, for us this meant that we would have to speed up, because otherwise we would be left behind.”