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.
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.
it's quite bad tbh. i've tried it for some time and i expected much more...
khalic 8 hours 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
himata4113 14 hours ago [-]
2023, but deadlines less than a month ago? Seems to be been updated continiously so (2023) doesn't really fit here.
dtech 12 hours ago [-]
I propose every Linux post should be tagged (1991) from now on
Why is this not written in German, I'm afraid to ask?
kuerbel 11 hours 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
ale42 8 hours 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.
kuerbel 8 hours ago [-]
heavy sigh I'm Swiss. I know. What I meant to say is that German is not the default language in Switzerland.
j7ake 10 hours ago [-]
Most researchers in Switzerland are non-Swiss, and many institutes have English as language of business
lynguist 8 hours ago [-]
Staff nationality of Swiss higher education institutions:
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
backscratches 9 hours ago [-]
It's a university in a French speaking region for one.
PetitPrince 7 hours 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).
13 hours ago [-]
dirasieb 13 hours ago [-]
english is the lingua franca
dackdel 10 hours ago [-]
because the brits won the language wars.
gib444 8 hours ago [-]
And the other wars ;)
arh5451 9 hours ago [-]
Because german is hard.
Rendered at 15:12:39 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
https://apertvs.ai/pages/documentation/
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.14233
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14233
Focus was on open data, languages and auditability.
Their loss function is fancy, not sure about the effects
- 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