Switzerland has made a significant contribution to the world of artificial intelligence (AI) by publicly announcing "Apertus," a large language model (LLM) developed at the national level. Developed collaboratively by EPFL (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne), ETH Zurich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich), and CSCS (Swiss National Supercomputing Centre), Apertus stands out with its fully open-source, transparent, and multilingual nature. The model, named Apertus – meaning "open" in Latin – emphasizes that all details of its development process, from its architecture to model weights, training data, and methodologies, are publicly available and documented.
The core philosophy behind Apertus's development is to present artificial intelligence as a tool that serves the public interest, free from commercial concerns. This approach distinguishes it from closed systems with restricted access, unlike major commercial models like OpenAI. Described by experts such as Imanol Schlag (Research Scientist at ETHZ AI Center) as "necessary for advancing research," Apertus aims to accelerate innovation, facilitate independent validation, and push forward research on the risks and opportunities of AI. It offers researchers, developers, and even curious users the opportunity to inspect the model, build upon it, and adapt it to their specific needs.
Apertus has been meticulously prepared with due consideration for Swiss data protection laws, copyright laws, and the transparency obligations of the EU AI Act. Particular emphasis has been placed on data integrity and ethical standards. Apertus's training dataset consists solely of publicly available data and was created by respecting machine-readable "opt-out" requests from websites and filtering personal data. This multilingual model was trained on 15 trillion tokens with over 1,000 languages, with 40% of the data being non-English. Consequently, it encompasses many languages that have previously been underrepresented in AI models, such as Swiss German, Romansh, and others.
Apertus is accessible through the strategic partner Swisscom platform, popular AI platforms like Hugging Face, and the Public AI network. The project, funded largely by CSCS’s "Alps" supercomputer with over 10 million GPU hours and investments from the ETH Board, also benefits from the support of strategic partners like Swisscom. This step strengthens Switzerland's vision of building its own "sovereign" and "trustworthy" AI structure. First practical experience opportunities for developers will be offered through hackathons at the upcoming Swiss {ai} Weeks events.