Switzerland Launches Apertus: A Transparent, Open-Source AI Model Challenging Global Tech Giants

Switzerland releases an open-weight AI model

Switzerland launched an open-source model called Apertus on Monday as an alternative to proprietary models like OpenAI's ChatGPT or Anthropic's Claude, reports SWI as spotted by Engadget. The model's source code, training data, model weights, and detailed development process are available on the AI model platform HuggingFace. Apertus, which is Latin for "open," was designed to "set a new baseline for trustworthy and globally relevant open models," according to the developers. The model was trained on over 1,800 languages and comes in two sizes with either 8 billion or 70 billion parameters. Apertus is comparable to the 2024 Llama 3 model from Meta, according to SWI. The model was built to adhere to the European Union's copyright laws and voluntary AI code of practice, which some US-based AI companies have said reluctantly signed while claiming that the regulations will curb AI innovation and deployment. Apertus' training data was restricted to public sources, while adhering to the AI crawler opt-out requests on certain websites, according to the developers. (No "stealth-crawling.")

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

Open-source 'Apertus' LLM could appeal to enterprises struggling to meet the privacy and copyright demands of AI regulation. In January, assumptions around AI were shaken up by DeepSeek, a small Chinese company that nobody had heard of. This week it was Switzerland's turn to stir things up. 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.

Switzerland launches its own open-source AI model

There's a new player in the AI race, and it's a whole country. Switzerland has just released Apertus, its open-source national Large Language Model (LLM) that it hopes would be an alternative to models offered by companies like OpenAI. Apertus, Latin for the world "open," was developed by the Swiss Federal Technology Institute of Lausanne (EPFL), ETH Zurich and the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS), all of which are public institutions. "Currently, Apertus is the leading public AI model: a model built by public institutions, for the public interest. It is our best proof yet that AI can be a form of public infrastructure like highways, water, or electricity," said Joshua Tan, a leading proponent in making AI a public infrastructure. The Swiss institutions designed Apertus to be completely open, allowing users to inspect any part of its training process. In addition to the model itself, they released comprehensive documentation and source code of its training process, as well as the datasets they used. They built Apertus to comply with Swiss data protection and copyright laws, which makes it perhaps one of the better choices for companies that want to adhere to European regulations. The Swiss Bankers Association previously said that a homegrown LLM would have "great long-term potential," since it will be able to better comply with Switzerland's strict local data protection and bank secrecy rules. At the moment, Swiss banks are already using other AI models for their needs, so it remains to be seen whether they'll switch to Apertus. Anybody can use the new model: Researchers, hobbyists and even companies are welcome to build upon it and to tailor it for their needs. They can use it to create chatbots, translators and even educational or training tools, for instance. Apertus was trained on 15 trillion tokens across more than 1,000 languages, with 40 percent of the data in languages other than English, including Swiss German and Romansh. Switzerland's announcement says the model was only trained on publicly available data, and its crawlers respected machine-readable opt-out requests when they came across them on websites. To note, AI companies like Perplexity have previously been accused of scraping websites and bypassing protocols meant to block their crawlers. Some AI companies have also been sued by news organizations and creatives for using their content to train their models without permission. Apertus is currently available in two sizes with 8 billion and 70 billion parameters. It's currently available via Swisscom, a Swiss information and communication technology company, or via Hugging Face.

Apertus: A fully open, transparent, multilingual language model

In July, EPFL, ETH Zurich, and CSCS announced their joint initiative to build a large language model (LLM). Now, this model is available and serves as a building block for developers and organizations for future applications such as chatbots, translation systems, or educational tools. The model is named Apertus -- Latin for "open" -- highlighting its distinctive feature: The entire development process, including its architecture, model weights, and training data and recipes, is openly accessible and fully documented. AI researchers, professionals, and experienced enthusiasts can either access the model through the strategic partner Swisscom or download it from Hugging Face -- a platform for AI models and applications -- and deploy it for their own projects. Apertus is freely available in two sizes -- featuring 8 billion and 70 billion parameters, the smaller model being more appropriate for individual usage. Both models are released under a permissive open-source license, allowing use in education and research as well as broad societal and commercial applications. A fully open-source LLM As a fully open language model, Apertus allows researchers, professionals and enthusiasts to build upon the model and adapt it to their specific needs, as well as to inspect any part of the training process. This distinguishes Apertus from models that make only selected components accessible. "With this release, we aim to provide a blueprint for how a trustworthy, sovereign, and inclusive AI model can be developed," says Martin Jaggi, Professor of Machine Learning at EPFL and member of the Steering Committee of the Swiss AI Initiative. The model will be regularly updated by the development team which includes specialized engineers and a large number of researchers from CSCS, ETH Zurich and EPFL. A driver of innovation With its open approach, EPFL, ETH Zurich and CSCS are venturing into new territory. "Apertus is not a conventional case of technology transfer from research to product. Instead, we see it as a driver of innovation and a means of strengthening AI expertise across research, society and industry," says Thomas Schulthess, Director of CSCS and Professor at ETH Zurich. In line with their tradition, EPFL, ETH Zurich and CSCS are providing both foundational technology and infrastructure to foster innovation across the economy. Trained on 15 trillion tokens across more than 1,000 languages -- 40% of the data is non-English -- Apertus includes many languages that have so far been underrepresented in LLMs, such as Swiss German, Romansh, and many others. "Apertus is built for the public good. It stands among the few fully open LLMs at this scale and is the first of its kind to embody multilingualism, transparency, and compliance as foundational design principles," says Imanol Schlag, technical lead of the LLM project and Research Scientist at ETH Zurich. "Swisscom is proud to be among the first to deploy this pioneering large language model on our sovereign Swiss AI Platform. As a strategic partner of the Swiss AI Initiative, we are supporting the access of Apertus during the Swiss {ai} Weeks. This underscores our commitment to shaping a secure and responsible AI ecosystem that serves the public interest and strengthens Switzerland's digital sovereignty," comments Daniel Dobos, Research Director at Swisscom. Accessibility While setting up Apertus is straightforward for professionals and proficient users, additional components such as servers, cloud infrastructure or specific user interfaces are required for practical use. The upcoming Swiss {ai} Weeks will be the first opportunity for developers to experiment hands-on with Apertus, test its capabilities, and provide feedback for improvements to future versions. Swisscom will provide a dedicated interface to hackathon participants, making it easier to interact with the model. As of today, Swisscom business customers will be able to access the Apertus model via Swisscom's sovereign Swiss AI platform. Furthermore, for people outside of Switzerland, the Public AI Inference Utility will make Apertus accessible as part of a global movement for public AI. "Currently, Apertus is the leading public AI model: a model built by public institutions, for the public interest. It is our best proof yet that AI can be a form of public infrastructure like highways, water, or electricity," says Joshua Tan, Lead Maintainer of the Public AI Inference Utility. Transparency and compliance Apertus is designed with transparency at its core, thereby ensuring full reproducibility of the training process. Alongside the models, the research team has published a range of resources: comprehensive documentation and source code of the training process and datasets used, model weights including intermediate checkpoints -- all released under the permissive open-source license, which also allows for commercial use. The terms and conditions are available via Hugging Face. Apertus was developed with due consideration to Swiss data protection laws, Swiss copyright laws, and the transparency obligations under the EU AI Act. Particular attention has been paid to data integrity and ethical standards: the training corpus builds only on data which is publicly available. It is filtered to respect machine-readable opt-out requests from websites, even retroactively, and to remove personal data, and other undesired content before training begins. The beginning of a journey "Apertus demonstrates that generative AI can be both powerful and open," says Antoine Bosselut, Professor and Head of the Natural Language Processing Laboratory at EPFL and Co-Lead of the Swiss AI Initiative. "The release of Apertus is not a final step, rather it's the beginning of a journey, a long-term commitment to open, trustworthy, and sovereign AI foundations, for the public good worldwide. We are excited to see developers engage with the model at the Swiss {ai} Weeks hackathons. Their creativity and feedback will help us to improve future generations of the model." Future versions aim to expand the model family, improve efficiency, and explore domain-specific adaptations in fields like law, climate, health and education. They are also expected to integrate additional capabilities, while maintaining strong standards for transparency.

Switzerland enters AI race with 'transparent' LLM

The large-scale open, multilingual language model includes many languages that have so far been underrepresented in LLMs, such as Swiss German and Romansh. Developed as part of the Swiss AI initiative and led by universities EPFL and ETH Zurich, as well as the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS), Switzerland has joined the AI race with the launch of its new LLM, Apertus. The result of collaboration from a range of engineers, researchers and students across the country, the creation of the model spans multiple institutions and disciplines, with its name coming from the Latin for "Open". Trained on 15trn tokens across more than 1,000 languages, Apertus has also utilised languages that, according to the developers, have been vastly underrepresented across the LLM space, such as Swiss German and Romansh. Designed as a hopeful alternative to existing models, for example Llama and OpenAI, Apertus is, according to the developers, defined by its transparency, which it says can be seen throughout the entire development process, via its architecture, model weights, training data and recipes, which are "openly accessible and fully documented". In a statement posted on its website, Apertus said that the LLM had been created with due consideration given to Swiss data protection laws, Swiss copyright laws and the transparency obligations issued under the EU AI Act. "Particular attention has been paid to data integrity and ethical standards, the training corpus builds only on data which is publicly available. It is filtered to respect machine-readable opt-out requests from websites, even retroactively and to remove personal data and other undesired content before training begins," read the statement. This comes at a time when AI and large language models are being heavily criticised for the methods they use to gather, deploy and store information for training their systems. In June of this year a group of authors filed a lawsuit against Microsoft, accusing the tech giant of using copyrighted works to train its large language model. A similar issue arose the previous year, as Elon Musk's AI chatbot Grok was found to be using X's user data to train itself, without explicit consent, raising significant concerns regarding privacy and the ethical use of information. Don't miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic's digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.

Switzerland launches safer and more accessible AI model

Known as Apertus LLM, it's an open-source programme that is designed to inspire public trust. Switzerland is looking to directly take on the mass commercialisation of artificial intelligence by now launching a new model programme that is designed to "inspire public trust" and be a "safer and more accessible" alternative to ChatGPT, DeepSeek, Llama, and more. Known as Apertus LLM, the AI has been created by leading Swiss universities and while it's directly mentioned that it lacks the power and advancements of say Meta's AI programme, the creative team are fine with lacking in this respect if it means they can provide the technology to scientific researchers, commerce, and the general public. As per Swissinfo.ch, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne EPFL professor Martin Jaggi, has stated: "We aim to provide a blueprint for how a trustworthy, sovereign and inclusive AI model can be developed." This is Switzerland's alternative to the privately-owned models that inspire fear from their untapped potential. Thanks to its open-source design, every part of the programme is designed to be able to be put under the scrutiny of the public. Do you think this is the right direction that AI development should follow?

Apertus, the Swiss open-source AI model: What it does and how it is different?

Built under EU AI Act rules, Apertus ensures privacy, compliance, and digital sovereignty In the rapidly evolving world of artificial intelligence, a new player has emerged, not from the tech giants of Silicon Valley, but from the heart of Europe. Switzerland's first large-scale, open, and multilingual language model, Apertus, is a collaborative effort by the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) and Zurich (ETH Zurich), along with the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS). The model, whose name is Latin for "open," is making waves for its distinct approach to AI development, one built on transparency, public good, and digital sovereignty. Also read: Meet GLM-4.5: The most capable open-source AI model yet Apertus's most defining feature is its commitment to being a "fully open-source" large language model (LLM). While many models are labeled as "open," they often only make certain components available, such as the model weights. In contrast, Apertus provides unprecedented access to its entire development process. This includes its architecture, training data, model weights, and even the "recipes" for training. This level of transparency is a deliberate choice, as highlighted by Martin Jaggi, a Professor of Machine Learning at EPFL, who stated the goal is to "provide a blueprint for how a trustworthy, sovereign, and inclusive AI model can be developed." This radical openness sets Apertus apart from most of its competitors, particularly the proprietary models like ChatGPT or Google's Gemini. These commercial models are often described as "black boxes," where the inner workings are hidden from public view. This lack of transparency raises concerns about bias, data usage, and accountability. Apertus, by contrast, allows researchers, developers, and even casual enthusiasts to inspect and audit every part of its creation. This means that data sources can be verified, adherence to data protection laws can be confirmed, and any potential biases can be identified and addressed by the community. The model's development was explicitly guided by Swiss data protection laws and the EU AI Act, with a focus on using only publicly available data. The project's developers went a step further by implementing a system to honor "machine-readable opt-out requests" from websites, even retroactively, and to filter out personal data and other unwanted content before training. This meticulous attention to privacy and compliance positions Apertus as a model built for the public good, a tool that can be trusted by a society increasingly wary of data exploitation. Also read: Google antitrust ruling: Chrome, Android, Search and India impact explained Beyond its ethical and transparent foundation, Apertus is designed to be a driver of innovation. Rather than being a conventional technology transfer from academia to a single product, the project aims to serve as a foundational technology and infrastructure for the entire Swiss economy and beyond. It is freely available in two sizes (8 billion and 70 billion parameters) under a permissive open-source license, allowing for broad societal and commercial use. This means that startups, SMEs, and researchers can build upon it, adapting it to their specific needs without the high costs or restrictive licenses of proprietary models. Another significant differentiator is Apertus's commitment to multilingualism. Trained on a massive 15 trillion tokens across more than 1,000 languages, the model boasts a remarkable 40% of its data being non-English. This includes languages that are often underrepresented in mainstream LLMs, such as Swiss German and Romansh. This focus on linguistic diversity ensures that Apertus is not only globally relevant but also serves the unique linguistic landscape of Switzerland and other smaller language communities. The project is the result of the Swiss AI Initiative, a large-scale open-science and open-source effort that brings together over 800 researchers from more than 10 academic institutions. The initiative is powered by one of the world's leading AI supercomputers, "Alps," located at the CSCS. This collaborative, non-commercial approach is a stark contrast to the closed-door, highly competitive nature of private AI research. In essence, Apertus is more than just a large language model; it is a statement of intent. It demonstrates a belief that AI, as a foundational technology, should be developed openly, responsibly, and for the benefit of all. By providing a blueprint for a "trustworthy, sovereign, and inclusive AI," Apertus stands as a compelling alternative to the dominant proprietary models, offering a path toward a more transparent and equitable future for artificial intelligence.