Apertus - Switzerland
= "Swiss large language model developed by Swiss Federal Institute of Technology"
URL = https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apertus_%28LLM%29
Description
1. By R. Trebor Scholz & Mark Esposito:
"Open-source, multilingual models such as Apertus, the Swiss large language model developed by Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, which offers a public alternative to extractive artificial intelligence systems and is trained using public infrastructure. Federated learning allows cooperatives to leverage AI while maintaining privacy by training algorithms locally rather than centralizing data. Shared protocols can further facilitate the technical integration of these efforts by providing the framework for a decentralized ecosystem of community-owned platforms."
(https://ssir.org/articles/entry/artificial-intelligence-solidarity-ecosystem)
2. From the Wikipedia:
"Apertus is a public large language model, developed by the Swiss AI Initiative (a collaboration between EPFL, ETH Zurich, and the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre). It was released on September 2, 2025, under the free and open-source Apache 2.0 license.
Designed initially for business and research use cases around the world, Apertus was trained on over 1800 languages, and comes in 8 billion or 70 billion parameter versions and is available on Hugging Face for download. The model was developed aiming to adhere to European copyright law, and is one of the first examples of AI as a public good in the vein of AI Sovereignty. It is also the first large model to comply with the European Union's Artificial Intelligence Act. At its launch, the model creators emphasized multilinguality, transparency, and auditability as priorities in contrast to commercial frontier model.[10] While international reception was largely positive[11], the first iteration was significantly behind the capabilities of frontier models and needs adaptation for many use cases with chatbots being a secondary but not a primary use case.
As of late 2025, it was considered the largest and most capable fully open model. The capability of future models will depend in part on how much more funding can be secured."