AI Business Strategy, Governance, Regulation Policy, Open-Source Democratised AISwitzerland releases 100 open AI modelMuhammad ZulhusniSeptember 4, 2025 Share this story: Tags:ethicsgovernmentllmopen-sourceCategories:AI Business StrategyGovernance, Regulation PolicyOpen-Source Democratised AIA group of Swiss institutions has released a new open AI model, designed to serve as a foundation for future research and applications. Built by EPFL, ETH Zurich, and the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS), the model is called Apertus Latin for open.
The name reflects its core principle: every part of its design and training process is accessible to the public.Developers and organisations can use Apertus to create chatbots, translation tools, or education-focused applications. It can be downloaded directly from Hugging Face or accessed through Swisscom, a strategic partner of the initiative.
Two versions are available an 8-billion-parameter model and a larger 70-billion-parameter version. Both are released under a permissive open-source licence, allowing use in research, education, and commercial projects.Built for opennessUnlike other AI systems that reveal only select details, Apertus is a fully open AI model, with its architecture, training data, and documentation available for inspection.With this release, we aim to provide a blueprint for how a trustworthy, sovereign, and inclusive AI model can be developed, said Martin Jaggi, Professor of Machine Learning at EPFL and member of the Steering Committee of the Swiss AI Initiative.
He said Apertus will be updated regularly by a team of engineers and researchers from CSCS, ETH Zurich, and EPFL.Thomas Schulthess, Director of CSCS and Professor at ETH Zurich, described Apertus as a driver of innovation and a means of strengthening AI expertise in research, society and industry. He said the project is not a typical transfer of technology from research to product, but an effort to build infrastructure for long-term use.Multilingual reachThe training process involved 15 trillion tokens in more than 1,000 languages, with about 40 of the data in non-English languages.
*Reporting by Artificialintelligence-news.*
