Apertus is the open source 8b and 70b LLM from swiss-ai. They've published both the base and the instruct sft models. Very cool that projects like this exist.
I haven't tried it for anything myself yet. The paper provides several benchmarks. The emphasis during training was on multi-language support (over 1800 languages are represented in its pre-training data, which is 40% non-English) and non-copyrighted training data... and the benchmarks seem to suffer for it.
Not really. It's because the target audience is more academic/scientific rather than the Swiss population at large. In the latter case, it would be in the local languages. The law is relatively clear for this. English is not accepted in Switzerland as a replacement language for the "local" ones, although many people can speak or at least understand some English.
Apertus is the open source 8b and 70b LLM from swiss-ai. They've published both the base and the instruct sft models. Very cool that projects like this exist.
https://apertvs.ai/pages/documentation/
Is it any good?
I haven't tried it for anything myself yet. The paper provides several benchmarks. The emphasis during training was on multi-language support (over 1800 languages are represented in its pre-training data, which is 40% non-English) and non-copyrighted training data... and the benchmarks seem to suffer for it.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14233
it's quite bad tbh. i've tried it for some time and i expected much more...
Tech report:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.14233
2023, but deadlines less than a month ago? Seems to be been updated continiously so (2023) doesn't really fit here.
I propose every Linux post should be tagged (1991) from now on
Has anything noteworthy come from this initiative? I have not heard of anything yet.
(2023) Little said at the time (4 points, 1 comment) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38529956
Related 2023 discussion (22 comments): <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38523736>
Why is this not written in German, I'm afraid to ask?
english is the lingua franca
Why is it not written in French? Or Italian? Or Romansh? Because Switzerland has four official languages and English makes it easier for everyone
Not really. It's because the target audience is more academic/scientific rather than the Swiss population at large. In the latter case, it would be in the local languages. The law is relatively clear for this. English is not accepted in Switzerland as a replacement language for the "local" ones, although many people can speak or at least understand some English.
Most researchers in Switzerland are non-Swiss, and many institutes have English as language of business
Staff nationality of Swiss higher education institutions:
- Universities: 55% Swiss, 45% foreign - Universities of applied sciences: 75% Swiss, 25% foreign - Universities of teacher education: 87% Swiss, 13% foreign - Professors: 49% Swiss, 51% foreign - PhDs/scientific collaborators: 30% Swiss, 70% foreign - Professors of ETH Zurich: 31% Swiss, 69% foreign
because the brits won the language wars.
And the other wars ;)
It's a university in a French speaking region for one.
Because german is hard.
Why it has to be german?