"Apertus: a fully open, transparent, multilingual language model
EPFL, ETH Zurich and the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) released Apertus 2 September, Switzerland’s first large-scale, open, multilingual language model — a milestone in generative AI for transparency and diversity.
Researchers from EPFL, ETH Zurich and CSCS have developed the large language model Apertus – it is one of the largest open LLMs and a basic technology on which others can build.
In brief Researchers at EPFL, ETH Zurich and CSCS have developed Apertus, a fully open Large Language Model (LLM) – one of the largest of its kind. As a foundational technology, Apertus enables innovation and strengthens AI expertise across research, society and industry by allowing others to build upon it. Apertus is currently available through strategic partner Swisscom, the AI platform Hugging Face, and the Public AI network. …
The model is named Apertus – Latin for “open” – highlighting its distinctive feature: the entire development process, including its architecture, model weights, and training data and recipes, is openly accessible and fully documented.
AI researchers, professionals, and experienced enthusiasts can either access the model through the strategic partner Swisscom or download it from Hugging Face – a platform for AI models and applications – and deploy it for their own projects. Apertus is freely available in two sizes – featuring 8 billion and 70 billion parameters, the smaller model being more appropriate for individual usage. Both models are released under a permissive open-source license, allowing use in education and research as well as broad societal and commercial applications. …
Trained on 15 trillion tokens across more than 1,000 languages – 40% of the data is non-English – Apertus includes many languages that have so far been underrepresented in LLMs, such as Swiss German, Romansh, and many others. …
Furthermore, for people outside of Switzerland, the external pagePublic AI Inference Utility will make Apertus accessible as part of a global movement for public AI. “Currently, Apertus is the leading public AI model: a model built by public institutions, for the public interest. It is our best proof yet that AI can be a form of public infrastructure like highways, water, or electricity,” says Joshua Tan, Lead Maintainer of the Public AI Inference Utility."
I don’t know any European country that has anything like the copyright clause in the US Constitution, or anything close to Fair Use. I don’t see the argument.
There’s a good chance that European AI companies like Mistral are breaking the law. We will have to see how it eventually goes in court. Recently, there was a decision in a Munich court against OpenAI. By that standard, even Apertus might be in trouble. But I doubt that decision will stand.
Well yes you’d need to go country by country to truly make an analysis. Maybe I’m talking more about enforcement than actual law, but as someone who has lived half his life on each continent, it’s much easier to get away with copyright infringement on the personal level in Europe.
Probably. Different countries in Europe have very different traditions there. I think the former socialist countries are still more relaxed. But the EU-line is rather dominated by countries like Germany.
Come to think of it. Switzerland officially takes a very lenient approach. It’s legal to download media files for personal use. But as you can see here, that leaves research and business hanging.