Jonas Andrulis

QuHarrison Terry presents Jonas Andrulis, CEO of Aleph Alpha, with the WTF Innovators Award for building tools that combat AI hallucinations by providing transparency and verifiability in generative AI output.

The WTF Innovators Award recognizes excellence at the precipice of societal change, with the inaugural class focusing on AI innovators. As a memento, each of the 34 awardees are gifted a featured song by QuHarrison Terry and Genesis Renji. We present “Shining”, produced by Nimso, to Jonas Andrulis.

Aleph Alpha is a Germany-based AI company that researches, develops, and operationalizes AI systems for generalizable purposes. The company aims to bring explainability and traceability into generative AI, not only to strengthen user trust in AI but also to satisfy the regulatory requirements in the forthcoming EU AI Act.

Aleph Alpha released Luminous, an open-sourced, multimodal large language model (LLM) that allows users to generate text while also verifying sources of the information and discovering the reasoning behind each response.

To achieve this groundbreaking level of transparency, they’ve built two functionalities for the Luminous model: AtMan and Explain.

AtMan, which stands for Attention Manipulation, allows users to manipulate the attention (importance) of specific tokens, words, or entire sentences in an input prompt in order to correct, guide, or reweight specific responses from the AI.

Explain gives a clear glimpse into how the AI arrives at their response, showing which parts of a text passage have caused or contradict the generated answer, thus allowing users to get a better sense of what may lead the AI to hallucinate false information.

The black-box-nature of AI systems is a great source of fear. We don’t necessarily know when, why, or how generative AI comes up with its hallucinated responses. Jonas Andrulis is directly combating this problem and showing us how AI companies can build tools that provide transparency into AI’s outputs, which is why he should be on everyone’s radar. – QuHarrison Terry.

Prior to founding Aleph Alpha in 2019, Jonas Andrulis founded Pallas Ludens in 2014. The machine learning company supplied labeling and annotation services for computer vision training and reference data.

From 2016 to 2019, Jonas served as Senior AI R&D Engineering Manager at Apple, where he oversaw machine learning R&D and prototyping.