Luminous

Luminous is a family of large language models from the German company Aleph Alpha, first released in April 2022 in three sizes: Luminous Base, Extended, and Supreme, with the largest Supreme tier reaching 70 billion parameters by that August. Aleph Alpha built Luminous as a multilingual model with an early focus on European languages and enterprise use cases where regulatory compliance and data residency in the EU matter. Its most distinctive feature is explainability: Luminous can point back to the specific passages in its input that a given output was based on, a source-attribution capability aimed at industries like law, finance, and government that need to audit AI-generated answers. Aleph Alpha positions Luminous as a European alternative to US-based models from OpenAI and Google, sold mainly to enterprise and public-sector customers through its own API rather than to general consumers.