Swiss AI Initiative (2023)

88 points
1/21/1970
4 days ago
by doener

Comments


cristoperb

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/

4 days ago

reconnecting

4 days ago

andsoitis

Is it any good?

4 days ago

cristoperb

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

4 days ago

nicolaric

it's quite bad tbh. i've tried it for some time and i expected much more...

4 days ago

khalic

Yes it’s not bad, although it’s not meant to be a chatbot, post training is limited, so it won’t feel as smooth as TOTL of course. The number of supported languages is mind boggling.

Focus was on open data, languages and auditability.

Their loss function is fancy, not sure about the effects

3 days ago

himata4113

2023, but deadlines less than a month ago? Seems to be been updated continiously so (2023) doesn't really fit here.

4 days ago

dtech

I propose every Linux post should be tagged (1991) from now on

4 days ago

gnabgib

(2023) Little said at the time (4 points, 1 comment) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38529956

4 days ago

TMWNN

Related 2023 discussion (22 comments): <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38523736>

4 days ago

throwpoaster

My standard question about Swiss engineering, “how many jewels?”, is failing me.

3 days ago

andsoitis

Has anything noteworthy come from this initiative? I have not heard of anything yet.

4 days ago

[deleted]
4 days ago

[deleted]
4 days ago

[deleted]
4 days ago

shlewis

Why is this not written in German, I'm afraid to ask?

4 days ago

kuerbel

Why is it not written in French? Or Italian? Or Romansh? Because Switzerland has four official languages and English makes it easier for everyone

4 days ago

ale42

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.

4 days ago

kuerbel

heavy sigh I'm Swiss. I know. What I meant to say is that German is not the default language in Switzerland.

3 days ago

j7ake

Most researchers in Switzerland are non-Swiss, and many institutes have English as language of business

4 days ago

lynguist

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

3 days ago

dirasieb

english is the lingua franca

4 days ago

[deleted]
4 days ago

rrgok

Why it has to be german?

4 days ago

leoh

What if I told you there’s this thing in 2026 called an LLM that can translate between any two languages with high fidelity for free, and you just clicked a single button in your browser to use it

3 days ago

backscratches

It's a university in a French speaking region for one.

4 days ago

PetitPrince

Not quite: it's a collab between both ETHZ (Zürich, German speaking) and EPFL (Lausanne, French speaking). According to the website, the actual hardware is distributed all over the country (including in the Italian part).

3 days ago

dackdel

because the brits won the language wars.

4 days ago

gib444

And the other wars ;)

4 days ago

arh5451

Because german is hard.

4 days ago