this post was submitted on 24 Nov 2025
245 points (96.2% liked)

Technology

77090 readers
1875 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related news or articles.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
  10. Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

"Apertus: a fully open, transparent, multilingual language model

EPFL, ETH Zurich and the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) released Apertus 2 September, Switzerland’s first large-scale, open, multilingual language model — a milestone in generative AI for transparency and diversity.

Researchers from EPFL, ETH Zurich and CSCS have developed the large language model Apertus – it is one of the largest open LLMs and a basic technology on which others can build.

In brief Researchers at EPFL, ETH Zurich and CSCS have developed Apertus, a fully open Large Language Model (LLM) – one of the largest of its kind. As a foundational technology, Apertus enables innovation and strengthens AI expertise across research, society and industry by allowing others to build upon it. Apertus is currently available through strategic partner Swisscom, the AI platform Hugging Face, and the Public AI network. ...

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. ...

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. ...

Furthermore, for people outside of Switzerland, the external pagePublic 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."

top 12 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] Lembot_0005@lemy.lol 34 points 4 days ago (3 children)

Multilingual language large language model.

[–] Prunebutt@slrpnk.net 23 points 4 days ago

Let's define a language to interact with this multilingual language large language model. I call it: The multilingual language large language model language.

[–] snoons@lemmy.ca 7 points 4 days ago

Zoomer tongue twisters

[–] Rhaedas@fedia.io 7 points 4 days ago

L
L L M M

It's a pyramid scheme!

[–] realitista@lemmus.org 18 points 4 days ago (1 children)

How does it stack up in benchmarks is the question.

[–] General_Effort@lemmy.world 8 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

Badly. This was released almost 3 months ago and completely failed to make a splash, just like the other European models you have never heard of.

There's a lot of denial about this, but you just can't make such models competitive in Europe. The copyright industry is too strong. This combines with a general culture of data ownership and control. Case in point, the copyright industry is especially strong in Denmark, and they are also champions of chat control.

[–] realitista@lemmus.org 5 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Copyright is arguably stronger in the USA, but there's a simple solution: just allow these companies to break the law.

[–] General_Effort@lemmy.world 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I don't know any European country that has anything like the copyright clause in the US Constitution, or anything close to Fair Use. I don't see the argument.

There's a good chance that European AI companies like Mistral are breaking the law. We will have to see how it eventually goes in court. Recently, there was a decision in a Munich court against OpenAI. By that standard, even Apertus might be in trouble. But I doubt that decision will stand.

[–] realitista@lemmus.org 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Well yes you'd need to go country by country to truly make an analysis. Maybe I'm talking more about enforcement than actual law, but as someone who has lived half his life on each continent, it's much easier to get away with copyright infringement on the personal level in Europe.

[–] General_Effort@lemmy.world 2 points 3 days ago

Maybe I’m talking more about enforcement than actual law,

Probably. Different countries in Europe have very different traditions there. I think the former socialist countries are still more relaxed. But the EU-line is rather dominated by countries like Germany.

Come to think of it. Switzerland officially takes a very lenient approach. It's legal to download media files for personal use. But as you can see here, that leaves research and business hanging.

[–] A_A@lemmy.world 7 points 4 days ago

"Apertus"

... or Aperture 😁 ? ...

GLaDOS is depicted in the series as an artificially superintelligent computer system responsible for testing and maintenance in the Aperture Science Computer-Aided Enrichment Center in all titles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GLaDOS

[–] vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org -2 points 3 days ago

Another argument in favor of living in a police state of rich blokes doing banking for mafia and dictators, which doesn't need any surveillance because police already sees everything, and what it doesn't notice, it chooses not to, and also it can legally bend you over when required. I mean, OK, nobody's inviting, LOL.

I mean, seriously I like such news, every polity gets its turn to be a force for good.

There's even been news of an attempt by a group of Swiss politicians to create a committee on Nagorno-Karabakh refugees' return and future political existence.

And they are propping up Taler.

Just - I value this family of technologies for one main trait, it's destructive to superficial authorization. As in - where in the olden days bot campaigns in social media could just work, possibly unnoticed, now you can be certain it's mostly bots unless you can't transparently establish connection to a person, backed by cryptography.

But OK, a public confirmation bot is good, especially if it talks in your Jura dialect unintelligible not just to me, but to most native German speakers.