Switzerland releases its own AI model trained on public data

Switzerland launched an open-source model called Apertus on Monday as an alternative to proprietary models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude, reports SWI as spotted by Engadget.

The model’s source code, training data, model weights, and detailed development process are available on the AI model platform HuggingFace.

Apertus, which is Latin for “open,” was designed to “set a new baseline for trustworthy and globally relevant open models,” according to the developers. The model was trained on over 1,800 languages and comes in two sizes with either 8 billion or 70 billion parameters. Apertus is comparable to the 2024 Llama 3 model from Meta, according to SWI.  

The model was built to adhere to the European Union’s copyright laws and voluntary AI code of practice, which some US-based AI companies have said reluctantly signed while claiming that the regulations will curb AI innovation and deployment. Apertus’ training data was restricted to public sources, while adhering to the AI crawler opt-out requests on certain websites, according to the developers. (No “stealth-crawling.”)