The state of Bavaria wants to develop AI applications for its own administration with the help of the AI start-up Aleph Alpha. The AI tools are intended to make a decisive contribution to relieving the burden on administrative employees, the Bavarian Digital Ministry explained on Monday. Among other things, artificial intelligence is intended to summarize documents, translate texts, refer to relevant legal texts and answer questions from administrative staff. But it should be purely a support system and people should remain in control.
Advertisement
“In this way, we relieve our employees of uniform tasks and confront bureaucracy and a shortage of skilled workers in equal measure,” said Bavaria’s Digital Minister Fabian Mehring. Aleph Alpha also announced that it would be opening a location in the Bavarian capital Munich and expanding its own data center in Bayreuth. It was not said how much the cooperation would cost Bavaria. A response to a query from the iX editorial team is still pending.
F13 and LLMoin
The AI applications are being developed by byte, the Free State's digital agency, which will have access to Aleph Alpha's technology as part of the cooperation. Existing prototypes will now be displayed on the Aleph Alphas technology platform and then tested by administrative employees. Aleph Alpha has already developed a comparable tool for the administration of the federal state of Baden-Württemberg – F13 has been available to state employees since May. In Hamburg, the AI assistant LLMoin, which was also implemented together with Aleph Alpha, has been being tested since the end of the month. The trend is apparently towards having its own AI assistant for each federal state.
With Luminous, Aleph Alpha has its own large AI model and is therefore in competition with US providers such as OpenAI. The stated claim of the great German AI hope is to launch sovereign applications with European values. At the end of last year, the Heidelberg start-up was able to secure around half a billion US dollars in a financing round.
(sigh)