Reading · AI Austria Newsletter

Matthias Grabner, Ting Wasner-Lian, Clemens Wasner, Ruben Hetfleisch · AI Austria Newsletter

It’s the season for closing tabs, yet the Austrian AI scene keeps opening new ones.

🎨 Say hello to our new Logo

When AI Austria started in 2018, the landscape looked very different. Today, AI is everywhere. While the technology has evolved, our core purpose hasn’t changed and we are still on this mission:
🔹 Uniting stakeholders to build a strong ecosystem
🔹 Promoting Austria as a top location for research and innovation
🔹 Giving national and international visibility to our community
🔹 Standing for a sensible, open, and valuable use of AI in society

Big thanks to Michael Katzlberger the creator of our new logo
To the next chapter 🥂

🏰 Join us for the next AI Stammtisch in Vienna

Together with aws Austria Wirtschaftsservice AI Adoption, we’re hosting the final event in our AI Stammtisch series in Wien at Microsoft Austria. This is a great opportunity to engage with Austria’s AI community, exchange ideas, and explore collaboration opportunities in an open and informal setting. Whether you’re an AI professional, researcher, or simply curious about the field, this event is the perfect chance to connect with like-minded individuals and contribute to the conversation.

📅 Monday, December 15
🕒 Time: 17:30 - 21:00 CET
📍 Location: Am Europlatz 3, 1120 Wien

» Registrations are open

📚 AI Austria Contributes to “AI as Innovation Engine for Styria” Book

This new anthology from Styria explores how the region can responsibly harness AI and shape its future. Patrick Ratheiser and Matthias Grabner from AI Austria contributed insights on removing key blockers (high energy costs, bureaucracy, strict AI Act enforcement) and deploying market-driven funding, data access improvements, and broad AI literacy initiatives. The book bundles expertise from research, business, and policy to inform a Styrian AI strategy balancing EU requirements with local strengths. Available as free PDF download or print order. » Download for free or order copy

📺 Scalable & performant hybrid AI for serious stuff: Dream or Reality?

Is scalable Hybrid AI a dream or reality? We are excited to invite you to the latest session of our webinar series hosted by aws and AI Austria. Together, we are discussing real-world experiences, current developments, and concrete challenges, straight from the practice of developers, companies, and projects.

📅 Thursday, December 4
🕒 Time: 15:00 - 16:00 CET
📍 Location: Online via MS Teams
👉 Register here

🚀 fonio.ai Closes €3M Angel Round to Automate Customer Communication

Vienna-based fonio.ai raised €3 million from 13 European angels including Daniel Gutenberg (early Meta investor) and Sequoia Scout. Handling 800,000 calls/month for 4,000+ DACH customers at €300k/month ARR, the startup swaps between OpenAI and Google Gemini models with under 800ms latency. 90% of calls handled autonomously at €9/hour vs €60-70 human cost. Expanding to omnichannel (email/chat) across Europe. » Read full interview

🏛️ AI Factory Austria Launches Supercomputer Services

AI Factory Austria (AI:AT) commenced operational services with AI-optimized supercomputer launching January 2027. Provides compute access for SMEs, startups, research, and public administration. Synergizes with University of Vienna AI Center and AITHYRA biomedical research institute. » Explore AI:AT

🏢 Optimuse Raises €4M Seed for Building AI

Optimuse raised 4 million euros seed from seed + speed and Blum Ventures. Vienna-based platform automates building engineering, renovation, and lifecycle operations for real estate sector. » Read more

🏆 Upper Austria Honors xLSTM AI Research with State Prize

Upper Austria awarded Sepp Hochreiter’s xLSTM research in Linz the 2025 State Prize. Extended Long Short-Term Memory (xLSTM) is a new transformer alternative architecture enabling faster, more precise text processing. Positions Austria as fundamental AI research hub. » Read more

🔬 OFAI Launches Federal Language Model Project

Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence (OFAI), celebrating 40 years, launched research project on a federal large-scale language model (Bundes-LLM). Also launched GermanDialects-AI project documenting and preserving regional language variants using AI. » Visit OFAI

Google launched Gemini 3 (Nov 18), topping LMArena leaderboard (1501 Elo); scores 37.5% on Humanity’s Last Exam, 91.9% GPQA Diamond, 1M-token context; Gemini 3 Deep Think pushes to 41% and 93.8% on same benchmarks with 45.1% on ARC-AGI-2.
Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.5 (Nov 24), achieving 80.9% on SWE-bench Verified (surpassing GPT-5.1’s 77.9%); passes human-level engineering exams; pricing slashed 67% from Opus 4, available across Azure, AWS, Google Cloud.
OpenAI released GPT-5.1 (Nov 12) with GPT-5.1 Instant (warmer, more conversational) and GPT-5.1 Thinking (adaptive reasoning spending variable time on complexity); introduced 6 new tone presets (Professional, Candid, Quirky) and granular tuning controls.
xAI released Grok 4.1 (Nov 17) with improved reasoning, multimodal understanding, and Grok 4.1 Fast optimized for agents with 2M-token context and Tool API orchestration for X integration.
AI funding surged to $3.5B+ in November: mega-rounds for Metropolis ($500M Series D), Armis ($435M), Beacon Software ($250M Series B)); infrastructure attracted >$1B signaling compute and edge AI focus.

Black Forest Labs (🇩🇪) released FLUX.2, its flagship image model with 4MP editing, multi-reference support, and improved text rendering, in four variants including open-weight FLUX.2 dev.
Black Forest Labs closed a €280 million Series B at €3B+ valuation from a16z, Nvidia, and others.
Mistral AI (🇫🇷) released Mistral 3, a 10-model family including flagship Large 3 (41B active parameters) with multimodal and multilingual capabilities, all under Apache 2.0 license.
DeepL (🇩🇪) launched DeepL Agent, moving beyond translation into enterprise workflow automation (sales, finance, HR, legal).
Switzerland 🇨🇭 released Apertus, a fully open multilingual LLM (8B/70B) trained on Alps supercomputer, available in 1,000+ languages.
Aleph Alpha (🇩🇪) released PhariaAI v1.251100.1, an enterprise AI stack emphasizing explainability and auditability for government/legal sectors.
European Commission published Digital Omnibus proposals (Nov 19) to streamline AI Act, GDPR, and Data Act compliance for SMEs.
Hugging Face hosted its largest hackathon (Nov 14–30) with 6,000+ registrants building on open European models.

Alibaba ModelScope released Z-Image, a 6B-parameter image generation model generating photorealistic images in <1 second on consumer GPUs with bilingual text rendering and open-source license.
ByteDance released Vidi2, a 12B multimodal video understanding model with spatiotemporal localization, processing hours-long raw video and generating short-form clips directly from footage.
DeepSeek released DeepSeekMath-V2, an open-source mathematical reasoning model scoring 118/120 on Putnam Exam and solving 5/6 IMO 2025 problems via self-verifying framework, fully MIT-licensed.
Moonshot AI released Kimi K2 Thinking (Nov 6), a 1T-parameter MoE model (32B active) trained for $4.6M, scoring 44.9% on Humanity’s Last Exam (beating GPT-5’s 41.7%) and 71.3% on SWE-Bench coding tasks.
Alibaba released Qwen3, a hybrid reasoning family (0.6B–235B parameters) in open-weight and commercial variants supporting 119 languages, trained on 36T tokens with agentic tool-calling and controllable inference.