Generative AI: 4 European alternatives to OpenAI

Artificial intelligence is constantly evolving and playing an increasingly important role in our digital world. OpenAI, based in the USA, is one of the best-known organizations in the AI field, thanks to projects such as GPT-3 or ChatGPT. However, Europe is not left behind, and also boasts innovative alternatives to OpenAI. In this article, we'll explore four of these European alternatives: the LightOn Large Language Models (LLMs), Mistral AI, Aleph Alpha and BLOOM.

1. Paradigm, generative AI to automate business tasks

En mars 2023, LightOn lançait officiellement Paradigm, sa plateforme d’IA générative. Présentée comme une alternative à ChatGPT spécialisée pour les entreprises européennes, elle se différencie par sa capacité à être installée sur leur propre infrastructure informatique ainsi que sa prise en charge des principales langues européennes. Grâce à la possibilité d’utilisation on-premise, LightOn promet ainsi un contrôle total des données aux utilisateur·rice·s.

Aimed primarily at small and medium-sized businesses and large corporations, Paradigm is presented as enabling employees to speed up or completely automate certain tedious tasks, by making the request in a simple natural language query. It is also said to be capable of synthesizing documents, keeping watch and transcribing meetings. It can also create prompts and fine-tune templates.

Their flagship LLM is Alfred, with its 40 billion parameters. It has been specialized from the open-source Falcon model with the Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) technique. Alfred is available as open-source and is regularly updated.

2. Simplify task management in organizations with Mistral.ai

Founded in 2023, Mistral AI also focuses on developing customized AI models for businesses. Based in Paris, the French start-up raised €105 million last June, setting a new record in the process.

But it also stands out for its open-source model: "We believe in open science, community and free software. We publish many of our models and deployment tools under permissive licenses. We benefit from the open-source community, and we give back to it," states the company's website. A willingness to evolve for and thanks to their community, and thus to go faster and further.

Volonté partagée par Meta (Facebook, Instagram) qui s’est également positionné sur le sujet en évoquant une ouverture open source de son intelligence artificielle générative Llama 2. Un positionnement stratégique lorsque l’on peut lire que le nouveau modèle de Mistral AI “Mistral 7b est meilleur que Llama 2 13B sur tous les benchmarks” (7b et 13b pour respectivement 7 milliards et 13 milliards de paramètres).

A promising start for this young French company, which is already competing with the big American language models.

3. Aleph Alpha, generative AI to optimize business tasks

German company Aleph Alpha is also presenting itself as a competitor to American giant OpenAI. Founded in Heidelberg in 2019, the startup already boasts 10,000 corporate and government customers!

Aleph Alpha uses the MAGMA (Multimodal Augmentation of Generative Models through Adapter-based Finetuning) method it has developed to handle modalities other than text, such as images.

Their technology is based on a control model to give users a better understanding of the results reported. One of the company's press releases reads: "All control models are capable of tracking correlations in information and correcting verified facts, and show which extracts of text in a source have caused or contradict the response generated by the system".

This commitment to transparency sets Aleph Alpha apart from its American competitors.

This LLM Luminous is available in different versions: 13 billion parameters, 30 and 70 billion parameters.

4. BLOOM, to enable your organization to manage tasks automatically

BLOOM (BigScience Large Open-science Open-access Multilingual Language Model) is the result of a project launched by start-up Hugging Face. Initially French, then American, the start-up brought together over 1,000 researchers for this project.

In 2021, she proposed to specialists in the field that they create a project similar to GPT-3, but based on more open principles of scientific collaboration. Bloom was born in July 2022, after a number of AI and language science experts expressed their interest in the project.

The entire design process of this 176-billion-parameter model is extensively documented, with particular attention paid to the data used for training. This Large Language Model is capable of processing and generating text in 46 languages.

Comment choisir parmi ces alternatives européennes à OpenAI ?

It's hard to choose when each of these models has its own advantages. Here's some information to help you decide:

Aleph Alpha differs from the other 3 solutions in that its proprietary models are closed, but available in different sizes.

For LightOn, Mistral and BLOOM, open-source models are a great advantage both for the various scientific advances and for private hosting to secure user data.

L’avantage est donné à Mistral pour ses performances avec un modèle de taille nettement inférieure (donc économe en terme de ressources et donc d’énergie). LightOn propose cependant une solution complète avec une interface facilitant la prise en main et un support pour l’utilisation du modèle.

If you still want to integrate the use of ChatGPT into your organization, you can set up a charter to govern the use of ChatGPT.

Conclusion

While OpenAI has made its mark on the generative AI market, these 4 European alternatives are set to overshadow it. LightOn, Mistral AI, Aleph Alpha and BLOOM each offer approaches to meet the ever-changing needs of AI.

These 4 Big Language Models represent a great opportunity for Europe to compete with American players and thus benefit from the potential of AI, to protect and better manage European citizens' data and to free itself from technological dependence on the Americans. A complicated gamble when resources, talents and data are to the advantage of the Americans. Contact us if you'd like to discuss your specific needs and find out how we can help you harness the full potential of artificial intelligence while respecting the environment and European values.

Don't miss our next resources