cristoperb8 hours ago
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.
reconnecting3 hours ago
Tech report:
andsoitis7 hours ago
Is it any good?
cristoperb6 hours ago
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.
nicolaric5 hours ago
it's quite bad tbh. i've tried it for some time and i expected much more...
khalic3 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
himata41139 hours ago
2023, but deadlines less than a month ago? Seems to be been updated continiously so (2023) doesn't really fit here.
dtech8 hours ago
I propose every Linux post should be tagged (1991) from now on
andsoitis6 hours ago
Has anything noteworthy come from this initiative? I have not heard of anything yet.
gnabgib12 hours ago
(2023) Little said at the time (4 points, 1 comment) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38529956
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TMWNN10 hours ago
Related 2023 discussion (22 comments): <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38523736>
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shlewis9 hours ago
Why is this not written in German, I'm afraid to ask?
kuerbel6 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
ale424 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.
kuerbel3 hours ago
heavy sigh I'm Swiss. I know. What I meant to say is that German is not the default language in Switzerland.
j7ake6 hours ago
Most researchers in Switzerland are non-Swiss, and many institutes have English as language of business
lynguist3 hours ago
Staff nationality of Swiss higher education institutions:
- 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
backscratches4 hours ago
It's a university in a French speaking region for one.
PetitPrince2 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).
dirasieb9 hours ago
english is the lingua franca
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rrgok4 hours ago
Why it has to be german?
leoh2 hours ago
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
dackdel6 hours ago
because the brits won the language wars.
gib4444 hours ago
And the other wars ;)
arh54514 hours ago
Because german is hard.