Swiss launch open source AI model as “ethical” alternative to big US LLMs

In January, assumptions around AI were shaken up by DeepSeek, a small Chinese company that nobody had heard of. This week it was Switzerland’s turn to stir things up.

Apertus (Latin for ‘open’) is a brand new large language model (LLM) that its creators, a group of Swiss universities in collaboration with the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS), claim is one of the most powerful open-source AI platforms ever released.

Benchmarked as roughly on par with Meta’s Llama 3 model from 2024, Apertus is not the most powerful LLM out there, but it is still formidable.