On September 30, 2022, a workshop on the multimodal transformer model of Aleph Alpha will take place in Darmstadt, for which the team led by Jonas Andrulis and Samuel Weinbach was awarded the German AI Prize. The large language model in production has 70 to 80 billion parameters, and the team is currently training a 300 billion parameter model. The research department of the Heidelberg-based company organizes the workshop together with hessian.AI, the Hessian AI research center headed by Darmstadt AI professor Kristian Kersting.
Workshop for the scientific AI offspring
Under the motto “Aleph Alpha meets hessian.AI”, the organizers are planning to give young scientists an insight into current machine learning research with the latest generation of artificial intelligence. The workshop takes place all day from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. It is primarily aimed at doctoral candidates in the field of natural language processing (NLP) and scientists with a focus on AI, but start-ups and other students can also apply to participate. Participation is free, but places are limited to 25.
Access to the latest research
The aim of the workshop is to promote talent and to network research and application areas. According to the announcement, the entrepreneurial perspective will also be discussed, and creativity is also desired. As stated in the announcement, the workshop participants will receive “access to Europe’s most powerful language model to date and exclusive insights into the latest AI research”.
In addition to the technical side, the focus is on real case studies which, according to the organizers, will shape human-machine interaction in the years to come. Those who take part can bring in their own use cases, including demos – there are no limits to the imagination. “We’re excited to see what creative demos the participants come up with using our large multimodal language models,” said Robert Baldock, a former Google Brain researcher and now a member of the Aleph Alpha scientific team.
In addition to him, the machine learning researchers Markus Schmitz, Johannes Hagemann and Björn Deisenroth will design the program and oversee the workshop round. Tobias Kehl and Michael Marquardt from AI Startup Rising are on site as co-pilots, coordinating the start-up activities in the hessian.AI environment.
On site at Hub 31 – register by September 8th
The workshop will take place in the Hub 31 technology and start-up center in Darmstadt. A laptop with an already installed Jupyter Notebook and Python is a technical requirement for participation. The AI model can be controlled via an API, and in the second part of the workshop the participants can test the API with free credits.
Registration is possible with a short description of your own background as well as potential use cases, ideas and concerns via the registration form on the hessian.AI website until September 8, 2022. The website provides details about the workshop and additional information on the AI base model can be found on Aleph Alpha’s website.
