Swiss AI Initiative (2023)

https://www.swiss-ai.org

by doener • 3 months ago

88 26 3 months ago

swiss-ai.org

gnabgib• 3 months ago

(2023) Little said at the time (4 points, 1 comment) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38529956

TMWNN• 3 months ago

Related 2023 discussion (22 comments): <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38523736>

himata4113• 3 months ago

2023, but deadlines less than a month ago? Seems to be been updated continiously so (2023) doesn't really fit here.

dtech• 3 months ago

I propose every Linux post should be tagged (1991) from now on

shlewis• 3 months ago

Why is this not written in German, I'm afraid to ask?

dirasieb• 3 months ago

english is the lingua franca

kuerbel2• 3 months ago

Why is it not written in French? Or Italian? Or Romansh? Because Switzerland has four official languages and English makes it easier for everyone

ale42• 3 months ago

Not really. It's because the target audience is more academic/scientific rather than the Swiss population at large. In the latter case, it would be in the local languages. The law is relatively clear for this. English is not accepted in Switzerland as a replacement language for the "local" ones, although many people can speak or at least understand some English.

j7ake• 3 months ago

Most researchers in Switzerland are non-Swiss, and many institutes have English as language of business

lynguist• 3 months ago

Staff nationality of Swiss higher education institutions:

- Universities: 55% Swiss, 45% foreign - Universities of applied sciences: 75% Swiss, 25% foreign - Universities of teacher education: 87% Swiss, 13% foreign - Professors: 49% Swiss, 51% foreign - PhDs/scientific collaborators: 30% Swiss, 70% foreign - Professors of ETH Zurich: 31% Swiss, 69% foreign

dackdel• 3 months ago

because the brits won the language wars.

gib444• 3 months ago

And the other wars ;)

backscratches• 3 months ago

It's a university in a French speaking region for one.

PetitPrince• 3 months ago

Not quite: it's a collab between both ETHZ (Zürich, German speaking) and EPFL (Lausanne, French speaking). According to the website, the actual hardware is distributed all over the country (including in the Italian part).

arh5451• 3 months ago

Because german is hard.

rrgok• 3 months ago

Why it has to be german?

leoh• 3 months ago

What if I told you there’s this thing in 2026 called an LLM that can translate between any two languages with high fidelity for free, and you just clicked a single button in your browser to use it

cristoperb2• 3 months ago

Apertus is the open source 8b and 70b LLM from swiss-ai. They've published both the base and the instruct sft models. Very cool that projects like this exist.

https://apertvs.ai/pages/documentation/

andsoitis2• 3 months ago

Is it any good?

cristoperb2• 3 months ago

I haven't tried it for anything myself yet. The paper provides several benchmarks. The emphasis during training was on multi-language support (over 1800 languages are represented in its pre-training data, which is 40% non-English) and non-copyrighted training data... and the benchmarks seem to suffer for it.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14233

khalic• 3 months ago

Yes it’s not bad, although it’s not meant to be a chatbot, post training is limited, so it won’t feel as smooth as TOTL of course. The number of supported languages is mind boggling.

Focus was on open data, languages and auditability.

Their loss function is fancy, not sure about the effects

reconnecting• 3 months ago

Tech report:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.14233

andsoitis2• 3 months ago

Has anything noteworthy come from this initiative? I have not heard of anything yet.

throwpoaster• 3 months ago

My standard question about Swiss engineering, “how many jewels?”, is failing me.

Swiss AI Initiative (2023)

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