Switzerland launches its first open and transparent AI model
Apertus is the country's first large-scale language model, trained exclusively on publicly available data.
Related news
Didier Guzzoni, the Swiss inventor of Siri
SwissCovid Keeps Your Secrets
EPFL spin-off Nexthink is the next Swiss unicorn
Since last week, Switzerland has had its own artificial intelligence system. Called Apertus, it is a large language model (LLM) that can be used to build AI applications such as chatbots. It was developed as part of the Swiss AI Initiative by EPFL and ETH Zurich in collaboration with the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS).
Radical transparency in AI
According to the press release, what distinguishes Apertus from many other LLMs is its commitment to transparency. Its architecture, training data and model weights are openly accessible and thoroughly documented. This is in contrast to most commercial systems, which are developed in secrecy and without clear traceability, the researchers noted.
Apertus demonstrates that generative AI can be both powerful and open.
Training on the 'Alps' supercomputer
The training was carried out on the 'Alps ' supercomputer (read our swiss.tech report) and ran for three months, processing 15 trillion tokens on more than 4,000 GPUs. One distinctive feature was that over 1,000 languages were included, with 40 per cent of the data being non-English. Consequently, Apertus incorporates many languages that are underrepresented in contemporary LLMs, including Swiss German, Romansh, and numerous others.
Built on public data and EU-compliant
Apertus is characterised by its strict adherence to copyright and data protection regulations. The researchers only used publicly available sources for training, respected opt-out signals and removed personal data. According to the developers, this makes Apertus the first major model to comply with the transparency requirements of the EU AI Act.
Apertus is available to download for free on the Hugging Face AI platform under the Apache 2.0 licence, which permits use for research and teaching, but also for commercial purposes. In addition, it can also be explored online via Public AI. Its release has been timed to coincide with Swiss AI Weeks, a nationwide series of events designed to translate Swiss AI research into societal and economic impact.