Swiss launch open source AI model as "ethical" alternative to big US LLMs

"Apertus (Latin for 'open') is a brand new large language model (LLM) that its creators, a group of Swiss universities in collaboration with the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS), claim is one of the most powerful open-source AI platforms ever released. Benchmarked as roughly on par with Meta's Llama 3 model from 2024, Apertus is not the most powerful LLM out there, but it is still formidable."

"Trained on 15 trillion tokens across using the 132-Nvidia H100 Alps CSCS supercomputer, it has been released on AI open source community site Hugging Face in an 8 billion parameter version for smaller-scale use, and a larger 70 billion parameter version suitable for research and commercial applications. However, Apertus was created to be more than big, its makers said. Their ambition was to build something completely different to the ChatGPT AI mainstream, including better serving a global user base by training it on a wide range of non-English languages."

"The first interesting feature of Apertus is simply that it is Swiss. This might sound like a detail, but could yet be an advantage in an industry dominated by nations such as the US and China. What's being pitched here is an idea of sovereign or national AI in which Switzerland offers European and global users something more distinctive than Silicon Valley's commercial AI models. A major part of this will be the model's open, ethical credentials."

Apertus is an open-source large language model developed by Swiss universities and the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS). It was trained on 15 trillion tokens using a 132-Nvidia H100 Alps CSCS supercomputer and released in 8 billion and 70 billion parameter versions on Hugging Face. Benchmarked roughly on par with Meta's Llama 3, Apertus emphasizes multilingual coverage and transparency of training data and methods. The project promotes a sovereign, Swiss AI option positioned to address enterprise concerns over privacy, copyright, and regulatory compliance by offering open, inspectable weights and reproducible training practices.

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