Switzerland launches its own open-source AI model

Switzerland has launched Apertus, its own open-source national Large Language Model (LLM), as an alternative to models offered by companies like OpenAI. Apertus was developed by Swiss public institutions, including the Swiss Federal Technology Institute of Lausanne (EPFL), ETH Zurich, and the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS). Apertus is designed to be fully open, allowing users to inspect any part of its training process. The model, its training documentation, and the datasets used are all publicly available. Apertus is built to comply with Swiss data protection and copyright laws, making it a suitable choice for companies that want to adhere to European regulations. The model was trained on 15 trillion tokens across more than 1,000 languages, with 40% of the data in languages other than English, including Swiss German and Romansh. Apertus is currently available in two sizes with 8 billion and 70 billion parameters and can be accessed through Swisscom or Hugging Face.