If you are talking about the type ahead, nope, working as designed but if you are talking about clicking on the ALE and entering a value in the panel that opens, they you can change the default by creating a new view.

In the vendor number field if you type 01ai and either press F2 or select the lookup button the lookup results will be filtered based on the portion of vendor number you entered. You can do the same thing in the vendor lookup itself by entering in a value in the search. Default is to search vendor number begins with. In lookup dialog if you type 01ai and press find it will also filter.