As artificial intelligence technology rapidly develops around the world, Switzerland has chosen to approach this issue from the perspective of "public infrastructure" and announced the launch of an open-source large-scale language model jointly developed by national research institutions and supercomputing centers.ApertusIts name comes from the Latin word "open", which symbolizes its emphasis on transparency and universal application.
Apertus was developed jointly by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zurich), and the Swiss National Supercomputing Center (CSCS), and is accessible by Swiss ICT company Swisscom and the Hugging Face platform.
The development team emphasized that Apertus is not only a technical solution, but also a conceptual practice: artificial intelligence should not be monopolized by a few large technology companies, but should be a public resource shared by all people, just like water, electricity or highways.
Unlike commercial AI models, Apertus is fully open to the public, including its complete training process, source code, and datasets. It also adheres to Swiss data protection and copyright regulations. This approach not only highlights Apertus's emphasis on transparency but also better complies with strict European regulatory requirements. In particular, the Swiss financial industry has extensively adopted AI technology, and the Swiss Banking Association has stated that having an independent model will help it comply with strict banking confidentiality and personal information management regulations in the long term.
In terms of technical specifications, Apertus offers two model versions, with 80 billion and 700 billion parameters, respectively. The training data scale reaches 15 trillion tokens, covering a total of over 1000 languages, of which approximately 40% is non-English, including Swiss German and Romansh, one of Switzerland's four national languages. Importantly, Apertus' training data is sourced from public sources and complies with the website's machine-readable denial agreement, avoiding the controversy currently facing some AI vendors, who are accused of unauthorized extraction of news or creator content.
Apertus has diverse application scenarios, ranging from research, education, translation, and chatbots to internal enterprise training tools. Its "built by the public sector for the public good" nature makes Apertus a unique alternative in the global competition among commercial AI models.
As countries around the world explore how to balance AI development and regulation, Switzerland's move presents another possibility: treating artificial intelligence as public infrastructure not only democratizes access to the technology but also helps ensure transparency and compliance. Whether the market truly accepts and widely adopts Apertus, particularly in the financial industry, which relies heavily on privacy and compliance, will remain a key focus.
