AI am from Austria

Or that the “Artificial Intelligence” programme at said university is seeing annual student growth of well over 30 % and is practically bursting at the seams?

Or that Austria has almost 400 AI start-ups and that just under 40 % of these companies were founded by women – both above the EU average?

Certainly, when it comes to AI, Austria also has many shortcomings, deficiencies and missed opportunities. But you already know that.

What I want to convey in this article is that a great deal is also happening in Austria, and that there are many exciting projects that need not hide from international competition.

With that in mind, I would like to introduce you below to a – highly subjective, extremely selective! – selection of the seven most exciting projects that you should definitely take a closer look at.

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Atlas

Atlas is a start-up in the field of generative AI that can generate high-resolution 3D worlds based on text and reference images. This can optimise workflows for designers and creatives – by up to 200 times, according to the founders.

The use case is extremely exciting, as it combines one of the specific strengths of modern generative AI – creative image generation – with high-revenue verticals: both the film and gaming industries generate revenues of several hundred billion USD annually.

Funding is correspondingly strong: the Vienna-based company has already raised several million euros in investment, including money from New Renaissance Ventures, a new Vienna-based VC for culture and creative start-ups.

Website: https://atlas.design/

zone14

While large language models and their applications are only slowly reaching product maturity, computer vision models have already been used in a wide range of fields for several years.

Football match data is still collected largely by hand, which is where the AI solution from the Vienna-based company zone14 comes in. It enables the automatic analysis of kilometres run, number of sprints, as well as team tactical elements such as actual positions, distances between lines and much more.

One exciting detail: AI models are (at leaststill) extremely susceptible to ‘data distribution shifts’, i.e. (often minimal) changes in the nature of the data between training data and production data. zone14 is using this to position itself: Unlike other providers, whose software is usually based on video footage from professional leagues with perfect conditions and therefore no longer works with poorer camera positions, weather, lighting or pitch conditions, its solution is intended to work even in adverse conditions.

Homepage: https://zone14.ai/

Mostly.ai

AI models need data to work well, and lots of it. In the sheer quantities we need to train large deep learning models, this data is 1) not so easy to come by, 2) difficult to verify in terms of content (for copyright, pornographic content, factuality, biases etc.) and, last but not least, 3) eventually depleted.

Mostly.ai enables developers of AI applications to synthesise data, thereby avoiding all the problems associated with real data. A particularly useful tool in times of increasing regulation.

The company, founded in 2017, is one of Austria’s established players and in 2022 raised a Series B round of 25 million USD.

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Oscar Stories

With Oscar Stories you can generate personalised bedtime stories for your children, in which they play the leading role alongside their family and friends.

What some people see as a point of criticism is, in my view, precisely what is exciting about products like Oscar Stories: Theoretically, you could put all this together yourself with ChatGPT and DALL-E. But not everyone has the know-how, time or inclination to engage with it. And not everyone likes sitting in front of a blank page.

This offers enormous opportunities for creative minds and resourceful entrepreneurs: They can transform formless technology into a polished product. All the building blocks are there and freely available, but they need to be identified, made accessible, developed further, brought to life and turned into a coherent user experience. This is anything but easy, of course, but you certainly no longer need a PhD to develop a great AI product.

Homepage: https://oscarstories.com/de/

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The Artistic Intelligence

The Pixel brothers take an artistic approach to the outputs of artificial intelligence with their exhibition ‘The Artistic Intelligence’, which took place some time ago but has been recreated online and has lost none of its relevance.

What defines art? Where does creativity end? Where does copying begin? And what value do AI-generated images have? All these questions now demand new answers, and the exhibition makes a valuable contribution to this.

Homepage: https://www.gebruederpixel.at/ki/

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ELLIS Unit Linz

The team led by Sepp Hochreiter in Linz is not Austria’s only relevant research centre, but presumably the most renowned and the one working most actively to establish Austria as an AI hub. Its research focus is on theoretical and experimental research in the field of artificial intelligence, while Günter Klambauer also leads an affiliated AI in Life Science Group.

Their work is frequently published in the world’s most prestigious scientific journals. For instance, an exciting paper was recently published in Nature: With CLOOME, researchers can enter images of cells or a chemical structure and receive a list of relevant microscopy images as search results. This method opens up entirely new insights into cell biology processes and how they are influenced by chemical agents. More

In addition to its focus on AI in the life sciences, ELLIS Unit Linz is also working on a new type of language model, effectively a rival to ChatGPT. On small datasets, the so-called xLSTMs are said to be faster, better and more resource-efficient than all other known language models. This is not certain, but if these results also hold for large datasets, it would be an incredibly consequential discovery.

Homepage: https://www.jku.at/en/lit-artificial-intelligence-lab/ellis-unit-linz/

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Textshine

The list would not be complete if I did not mention my own product too 🙂

Textshine is the world’s first fully-fledged proofreading programme, almost as accurate as a professional, but 10x cheaper, 100x faster and available 24/7.

Every company produces countless texts that need to be proofread: brochures, websites, announcements and much more. Textshine allows you to proofread all these texts at the touch of a button and gives you the confidence that you have not overlooked any embarrassing mistakes.

Homepage: https://www.textshine.com/

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Not only is this list highly subjective, it is also necessarily incomplete. Clemens Wasner, co-founder of enliteAI and Chairman of AI Austria (two more great projects!), takes on the Herculean task every year of compiling as many Austrian AI companies as possible for the AI Landscape Austria, which now includes almost 400 companies. Anyone who wants to experience “AI in Austria” first-hand should check out the Vienna Deep Learning Meetup, a (not quite) monthly gathering where researchers, users and interested people come together and exchange ideas about the latest developments.

So if someone in your circle complains next time that all AI always comes only from the USA or China, feel free to refer them to this article – or click through the AI Landscape and create your own list.