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.
replyTech report:
replyIs it any good?
replyI 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.
replyit's quite bad tbh. i've tried it for some time and i expected much more...
replyYes 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.
replyFocus was on open data, languages and auditability.
Their loss function is fancy, not sure about the effects
2023, but deadlines less than a month ago? Seems to be been updated continiously so (2023) doesn't really fit here.
replyI propose every Linux post should be tagged (1991) from now on
replyMy standard question about Swiss engineering, “how many jewels?”, is failing me.
reply(2023) Little said at the time (4 points, 1 comment) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38529956
replyHas anything noteworthy come from this initiative? I have not heard of anything yet.
replydeleted
replyRelated 2023 discussion (22 comments): <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38523736>
replydeleted
replydeleted
replyWhy is this not written in German, I'm afraid to ask?
replyWhy is it not written in French? Or Italian? Or Romansh? Because Switzerland has four official languages and English makes it easier for everyone
replyNot 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.
replyheavy sigh I'm Swiss. I know. What I meant to say is that German is not the default language in Switzerland.
replyMost researchers in Switzerland are non-Swiss, and many institutes have English as language of business
replyStaff nationality of Swiss higher education institutions:
reply- 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
Why it has to be german?
replyWhat 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
replyIt's a university in a French speaking region for one.
replyNot 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).
replydeleted
replyenglish is the lingua franca
replybecause the brits won the language wars.
replyAnd the other wars ;)
replyBecause german is hard.
reply