"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."

"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 have been looking into setting up a secure home/small business server and hardening my local network and I came across this kickstarter which is currently floundering, likely because it’s campaign page is way too technical without enough fluff for the uninformed out there (like myself to some extent). For reference I work in small industry and have some interest in implementing more IOT, and also want to self host more of my media probably via Jellyfin, and an indieweb site, possibly some AI automation via n8n.

That said, from what I can tell it seems like a really great device for my use case actually, combining a multiband WiFi 7 gateway with a built in NAS and upgradeable compute modules. As a bonus it is a German company so I’m a bit less worried about back doors that with some of the Chinese generic manufacturers out there. That said, I haven't run a server of my own before and am not sure what to make of the hardware specifications.

What I can’t sus out is how secure this actually is, how technical my background needs to be to get it set up effectively, and whether the price is good for the hardware. Any help?

I have been looking into setting up a secure home/small business server and hardening my local network and I came across this kickstarter which is currently floundering, likely because it’s campaign page is way too technical without enough fluff for the uninformed out there (like myself to some extent). For reference I work in small industry and have some interest in implementing more IOT.

That said, from what I can tell it seems like a really great device for my use case actually, combining a multiband WiFi 7 gateway with a built in NAS and upgradeable compute modules. As a bonus it is a German company so I’m a bit less worried about back doors that with some of the Chinese generic manufacturers out there.

What I can’t sus out is how secure this actually is, how technical my background needs to be to get it set up effectively, and whether the price is good for the hardware. Any help?

I have been looking into setting up a secure home server and hardening my local network and I came across this kickstarter which is currently floundering, likely because it's campaign page is way too technical without enough fluff for the uninformed out there (like myself to some extent).

That said, from what I can tell it seems like a really great device for my use case actually, combining a multiband WiFi 7 gateway with a built in NAS and upgradeable compute modules. As a binus it is a German company so I'm a bit less worried about back doors that with some of the Chinese generic manufacturers out there.

What I can't sus out is how secure this actually is, how technical my background needs to be to get it set up effectively, and whether the price is good for the hardware. Any help?