alt.hn

4/19/2026 at 10:58:35 PM

Swiss AI Initiative (2023)

 https://www.swiss-ai.org

by doener

4/20/2026 at 2:36:42 AM

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/

by cristoperb

4/20/2026 at 4:10:14 AM

Is it any good?

by andsoitis

4/20/2026 at 4:22:38 AM

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

by cristoperb

4/20/2026 at 5:46:55 AM

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

by nicolaric

4/20/2026 at 7:30:12 AM

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

by khalic

4/20/2026 at 1:37:58 AM

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

by himata4113

4/20/2026 at 3:02:19 AM

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

by dtech

4/20/2026 at 4:49:50 AM

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

by andsoitis

4/20/2026 at 1:12:40 PM

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

by throwpoaster

4/20/2026 at 2:03:46 AM

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

by shlewis

4/20/2026 at 4:14:08 AM

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

by kuerbel

4/20/2026 at 6:57:51 AM

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.

by ale42

4/20/2026 at 7:30:31 AM

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

by kuerbel

4/20/2026 at 4:43:19 AM

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

by j7ake

4/20/2026 at 7:21:44 AM

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

by lynguist

4/20/2026 at 6:43:20 AM

Why it has to be german?

by rrgok

4/20/2026 at 8:48:47 AM

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

by leoh

4/20/2026 at 6:27:41 AM

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

by backscratches

4/20/2026 at 8:28:04 AM

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).

by PetitPrince

4/20/2026 at 2:07:05 AM

english is the lingua franca

by dirasieb

4/20/2026 at 4:49:57 AM

because the brits won the language wars.

by dackdel

4/20/2026 at 7:08:38 AM

And the other wars ;)

by gib444

4/20/2026 at 6:40:56 AM

Because german is hard.

by arh5451