Swiss AI Initiative (2023)

(swiss-ai.org)

88 points by doener2 days ago

10 comments

cristoperb2 days ago
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.<a href="https://apertvs.ai/pages/documentation/" rel="nofollow">https://apertvs.ai/pages/documentation/</a>
- reconnecting2 days ago
 Tech report:<a href="https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.14233" rel="nofollow">https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.14233</a>
- andsoitis2 days ago
 Is it any good?
 - cristoperb2 days ago
 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.<a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14233" rel="nofollow">https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14233</a>
 - nicolaric2 days ago
 it's quite bad tbh. i've tried it for some time and i expected much more...
 - khalic2 days ago
 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
himata41132 days ago
2023, but deadlines less than a month ago? Seems to be been updated continiously so (2023) doesn't really fit here.
- dtech2 days ago
  I propose every Linux post should be tagged (1991) from now on
TMWNN2 days ago
Related 2023 discussion (22 comments): <<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38523736">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38523736</a>>
gnabgib2 days ago
(2023) Little said at the time (4 points, 1 comment) <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38529956">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38529956</a>
andsoitis2 days ago
Has anything noteworthy come from this initiative? I have not heard of anything yet.
throwpoaster1 day ago
My standard question about Swiss engineering, “how many jewels?”, is failing me.
shlewis2 days ago
Why is this not written in German, I'm afraid to ask?
- kuerbel2 days ago
 Why is it not written in French? Or Italian? Or Romansh? Because Switzerland has four official languages and English makes it easier for everyone
 - ale422 days ago
 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.
 - kuerbel2 days ago
 heavy sigh I'm Swiss. I know. What I meant to say is that German is not the default language in Switzerland.
- j7ake2 days ago
 Most researchers in Switzerland are non-Swiss, and many institutes have English as language of business
 - lynguist2 days ago
 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
- dirasieb2 days ago
 english is the lingua franca
- rrgok2 days ago
 Why it has to be german?
 - leoh1 day ago
 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
- backscratches2 days ago
 It's a university in a French speaking region for one.
 - PetitPrince2 days ago
 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).
- dackdel2 days ago
 because the brits won the language wars.
 - gib4442 days ago
 And the other wars ;)
- arh54512 days ago
 Because german is hard.