Apertus – Open Foundation Model for Sovereign AI

	Apertus – Open Foundation Model for Sovereign AI(apertvs.ai)
	531 points by T-A 45 days ago \| 181 comments
	tl;dr: Apertus is a fully open foundation model from the Swiss AI Initiative (EPFL, ETH Zurich, CSCS), releasing weights, training data, code, and methodology under reproducible terms. It comes in 8B and 70B parameter sizes, is trained on 1000+ languages, and is designed for EU AI Act compliance, including respecting opt-outs, removing PII, and mitigating memorization.
	HN Discussion: ~Other fully open LLMs like OLMo and Nemotron already exist and may be stronger ↓Skeptical that a committee-driven project can deliver a competitive model ↑The real value is in building local AI talent and expertise for future projects ↑Open models like Apertus threaten commercial AI labs and represent the future ↓Model quality is poor in practice, hallucinating despite multilingual claims