Luminous

Luminous is a family of large language models (LLMs) developed by the German company Aleph Alpha, headquartered in Heidelberg, released on 12 October 2022. The models are built on a transformer (GPT) architecture with self-supervised learning, aimed at enterprise and public-administration use (“sovereign AI”).

The family includes variants differing in scale: Luminous-base (~13B parameters, 2K context window), Luminous-extended (~30B, 8K window), Luminous-supreme (~70B) and the instruction-tuned Luminous-supreme-control. The base and extended variants are multimodal — accepting text and images as input.

A distinctive feature of Luminous is explainability: Aleph Alpha provides methods (including AtMan) that make the model’s decisions more understandable, addressing the “black box” problem. The models are multilingual (including English, German, French, Spanish and Italian) and were offered via an API and in local/on-premises deployments compliant with European data-protection standards.

Luminous is a proprietary model aimed at enterprise and public-sector customers. Aleph Alpha (founded in 2019 by Jonas Andrulis and Samuel Weinbach) has been backed by Schwarz Gruppe, Bosch and SAP, among others. The Luminous family was subsequently succeeded by the Pharia models.