Apertus – Open Foundation Model for Sovereign AI
apertvs.ai477 points by T-A 17 hours ago
477 points by T-A 17 hours ago
Other fully open LLMs include Allen AI's OLMo 3.1 and MBZUAI's K2 Think V2, both of which have released their full training pipelines and datasets.
Nvidia Nemotron is also an open training source model, though a portion of its dataset remains proprietary.
Quoting lambda's comment:
> Note that the Nemotron models are generally stronger than Olmo and K2 Think V2 (according to Artificial Analysis benchmarks), and there is a lot of overlap in their datasets (lots of datasets are based on the same sources with different filtering, Olmo and K2 Think V2 both have used some Nemotron datasets).
> But yeah, Nemotron is a modern and fairly capable LLM, even the 122b is more capable than Deepseek R1 (a 671b model) on most benchmarks, and there's also the recently released 550b Ultra now.
Allen AI do not get enough love. They are doing GenAI how it should have always been done.
In fact, if the frontier companies had taken their approach, it would have started much slower, but I think we would be far more advanced by 2035. Instead we have a majority of society that wants to see AI fail.
> Instead we have a majority of society that wants to see AI fail.
Do you talk to regular people? I work out of coffee shops routinely and literally like 90% of laptops have ChatGPT or Claude open. I was shocked at how many of my friends love the silliest of AI features (like Slack bot summarizing your day or your upcoming meetings), and a lot of decks, proposals, SOW's, etc. are (at least in part) generated with AI these days.
Depends very much on the society and the context you catch it in.
Young people who want to have secure jobs and who have any kind of experience with creativity see AI coming for their livelihoods and their joy simultaneously.
Middle-aged IT industry people like me, many of us are grudgingly learning it but believe it to be an obvious net negative the way it is currently deployed; it feels like we're automating all the wrong stuff.
I wouldn't go around talking as if people think AI is great. A solid proportion of the population would be tempted to push AI influencers under buses and trains.
Ironic that you should question if the commenter talks to regular people and then cite people who work on laptops from the coffee shop, use Slack etc.
A quarter of US citizens use a Chatbot daily.
https://www.pewresearch.org/chart/about-a-quarter-of-u-s-adu...
It all, of course, depends on what people mean by "AI" (I think the question basically defeats itself, it's akin to asking someone about "databases", given that it covers image generation, self driving cars, TikTok feeds, drug discovery and chatbots) but AI sentiment at large is more negative than positive.
https://www.pewresearch.org/chart/americans-predict-ais-impa...
So, depending on where you sit: Sure, most people will use "AI", meaning a chatbot (probably ChatGPT: https://www.pewresearch.org/chart/americans-report-using-cha...). 90% in coffee shop land, why not.
But that does not mean that they are not weary of the consequences, and are growing more weary. I think, predictably, the better situated you are and the more your direct livelihood is at stake. That's just the animal we are.
Does that mean that we should have slowed down? Matter of opinion. My take: Absolutely not. The people who need it the most around the world will have dramatically improved lives, because of access to better medical advice or information about institutions and systems, to start things and help them in their daily lives.
I think you meant "wary" of the consequences…
But this is one of those unique situations where wary (cautiousness, concernedness, preparedness, tinged with fear) and weary (exhaustion with a mental component) are overlapping into one horrible thing.
So I'm not correcting you because I think basically both are right: we are going through both of these at once because anxiety is what Scam and Wario in particular are selling.
I'm calling yesterday as Peak Height of AI...
I was at my daughter's football game, and another father from the club came up to me and asked if I were in IT and knew how AI worked. He then asked if I could help him setup an AI agent to generate passive income.
We're at the equivalent of December 2017 for crypto. Hang on to your hats!
It’s rare to find an example in English that demonstrates the difference in meaning between subjunctive and conditional.
Was it a two part question converted into one with a gate at the beginning, or was a general question about occupations and abilities?
They use it, but do they love it or do they feel like they need it to do their best work and stay ahead?
I hate cars but I still drive to the office 1x / week because I have to.
Informed society is getting tired of unethical finance bro technocrats buying political influence and power with ill-gotten gains.
LLMs were invented by AI2, before Transformers were a thing - with RNN-based ELMO.
I don't want AI to fail but I would like to see Altman anf Musk fail for example. I'm very uneasy with the power hungry silicon valley freaks that are running the show at these labs/companies. Hassabis seems like the only one that is not actually Evil.
Is there any evidence that "a majority of society wants AI to fail"
Or is it just vibes?
There’s a few polls that have shown most people use AI, but they also dislike it. I’m in that boat, where my company pays for my subscription, and I use it to be productive. But I don’t really feel good about it.
https://gizmodo.com/people-hate-ai-even-more-than-they-hate-...
Does it count when I hate the Dario, Altman and their weird cult more and more, every time they open their mouths? I think that I would not hate the tech in isolation, but considering who tech elite became, their rhetoric and how they behave , I want them fail just because of that.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48573332
Was discussed just recently, and there are multiple articles and surveys on AI sentiment.
Fully agree with this and they were leading robotic learning as well even back to 2019.
IsaacSim was (and might still be) the best robotic learning sim and I ran MLAgents.
> an open training source model
It's always funny to see people tempted to call open-blobs/open-weights, which are literally shareware like WinRAR or Adobe PDF Viewer, open source, and then need to invent a new term for what is actually open source.
Nemotron is vastly different from standard open-weight models. Its entire training pipeline is open-sourced, while other vendors typically only release the model weights.
Maybe I'll give Nemotron another try. Yesterday I used the latest one on OpenRouter and it was bad - worse than StepFun
I like the idea, and it has become more pressing that everyone outside the US think about tech sovereignty because the US has become an unsafe place to keep your data, but the impression I get from Apertus is that it moves at the speed of a committee. I have no expectation they'll deliver a competitive model. At least, not competitive with current models. Maybe competitive with models a year ago (though they haven't even done that yet, right?).
"the US has become an unsafe place to keep your data"
I empathize with this but curious what would make any other country a better safehaven for your data? I personally like the EU's approach to data safeguards, but are there other locales/data protections you have in mind that would keep your data "safe".
I live in the USA and I use a European LLM as a daily driver: Proton’s lumo+ that does a good job packaging a Mistral model for general chat, with good searchable chat history — all with adequate privacy guarantees. Well worth the money.
I purchase open model tokens for agent programming assistance, and I like lumo+ for everything else.
Another option is DuckDuckGo’s Duck.ai subscription, but I slightly prefer ProtonMail’s lumo+ packaging as a product.
Do you go through all this trouble out of principle or necessity?
Out of principle. Also, I am an old man and retired - makes it easier to give up a little bit of productivity.
The law varies from country to country, but at least I vote for the legislators creating the laws governing my local sovereign AI.
Putting aside reliable rule of law, as others have pointed out, it seems unwise to keep your data in a country that has repeated threatened to annex or invade yours.
The rule of law exists in other countries in a way it does not in the US right now.
Can you give examples?
Is this a good faith question? It would take several hundred pages to document even a fraction of the violations.
How about deporting people without a hearing or opportunity to present evidence about their charges. And then violating the judges order to turn the planes around.
How about systematically ignoring judicial rulings.
How about detaining people based on the color of their skin and spoken language/accent.
How about violating the emoluments clause of the constitution by accepting a personal airplane.
How about sending your son in-law, who hasn’t been appointed to any office with the advice and consent of congress as required by the constitution.
How about refusing to seat elected congress members for reasons for months.
How about singling out companies like intel for targeted trade restrictions and then demanding equity in order to lift them.
What about threatening to delay or deny a merger of a media company unless your ally is allowed to buy them.
What about refusing to enforce the TikTok ban until you can arrange a buy out to an ally.
What about a formal market with a known price for pardons and commutations.
What about stating multiple wars without congressional approval.
What about creating a fake department named Doge that withholds funds apportioned by congress and breaks contracts that have explicit obligations for payment that results in more termination fees and losses than the savings. All without congressional approval.
How about threatening to withhold federal funds from states with governors of the opposing political party but not your own? Remember the president is supposed to execute the law congress passes not make law or arbitrarily enforce it based on their own political needs or values.
> How about deporting people without a hearing or opportunity to present evidence about their charges.
Not to detract from your general point about the US, your first point is something that's happened recently in Switzerland:
https://truthout.org/articles/swiss-police-arrest-deport-pal...
And a Swiss court decided that this was illegal and disproportionate [1]. Rule of law does not mean that nothing illegal happens in the country (that's obviously impossible to guarantee). It means illegal acts have consequences.
[1] https://www.bvger.ch/en/newsroom/media-releases/fedpol-must-...
That distracts from the point in favor of what, in this context, is a detail.
There are always incidents in all democracies with millions of people, that contravene the expectations of rule of law and integrity of its systems.
The US has degenerated significantly in the past few years, to the point that when someone asks “can you give examples”, I expect a disingenuous ploy more than genuine ignorance. The list of breaches is so long, that listing it results in numbness and exhaustion of the mental muscles responsible for being aghast.
Searching and seizure of your laptops, including your personal phones without a probable cause or warrant.
Compel you to reveal your secrets, including your passwords by threatening to arrest and detain you without legal proceedings for an unspecified period.
Deny your basic human rights, particularly at the borders, especially if you aren’t a citizen.
And more.
Illegal tariffs, executive usurping congress power of the purse, Noem funding herself and friends with a commercial from an unknown entity with tax payer money, people in ICE/FBI handing over undisclosed unaccounted money in brown bags, insider trading is rampant, using funds inappropriately to fly girlfriend places that isn't official business, illegally using private money to fund public projects, taking bribes from foreign nations like jets and such violating emulation clauses, passing no bid contracts to people you know, using the pardon power inappropriately to pardon crypto scammers and other white collar crimes, moving notorious Epstein related criminals to a low security prison without going through the courts, avoiding justice for sex crimes of the rich, using the DOJ as a political cudgel, and the list goes on.
Wow, this is a bit obtuse.
It is a commonly accepted "fact" right now, outside the US, that the US is not to be trusted (right now), due to some orange guy, and his mates, manipulating markets, running their mouths, doing all kinds of criminal and/or infantile shit.
I'd say there is quite a bit of evidence for this all around.
> infantile shit
I think it’s valid to not trust the US with your data. But if the reason is some TDS “Orange Man Bad”, it’s you that’s acting infantile.
I don't know what else to call it? Seriously, 2 words, and I'm sure it is spot-on.
Hardly obtuse. It's good to be specific when making broad claims. The graft of Trump is a big problem, IMO, but the claim was larger than that, as being something about America's system of Law and Justice, and I don't see these as being completely busted (yet) by the Orange Man
Sorry but questioning that claim at this point verges on bad faith or credulity.
Ask intel, paramount, TikTok or anthropic if they feel law will be applied equally to all companies.
Ask the blue states that had fema funding withheld when it went to red states.
Ask black families that haven’t gotten reparations when Jan 6 rioters that beat and killed cops to over turn an election will get almost $2b in reparations and then had the Supreme Court throw out their votes in Louisiana in the middle of an election to overturn the voting rights act, redraw districts, overturn their own case law and the principle that judicial review shouldn’t happen too close to an election so they could redraw the districts.
Business leaders are sucking up to curry favor. That by definition isn’t the rule of law it’s the rule of dispensation. It’s the spoils system.
If you have a counter argument you’d better make it now or you will tip your hand.
Well, the system allowed Trump to be elected, twice, and the system hasn't (so far) prevented him from abusing his office in the ways mentioned. So it's fair to conclude that the US system is the problem, not the symptom called Trump. And if that's the case, it's also fair to conclude that the US is no longer trustworthy, because Trump could happen again.
It isn't completely busted, unless the Trump administration has a personal interest in overriding the law. As sometimes happens when some foreign power, or just a random politician in another nation, does something he doesn't like. Or, when Trump has a personal stake in some other outcome. Who wants to gamble that Trump won't decide to wreck your businesses, sabotage your defenses, or spy on European citizens? We now know most of the major tech companies won't object to information requests, and probably won't even reveal that they've given access to the US government. US citizens maybe still have some protections, but everyone else seems to be fair game.
Frankly, I'm surprised there's not more urgency on the part of Europeans to reduce dependence on US tech. I don't like it. I'm an American in tech. But, the US can't be trusted, at this time. And, given how irresponsible tech leadership has been, in kowtowing to Trump, I don't see how they can reasonably be trusted, either.
They are moving swiftly actually. France announced the government is moving to Linux, several other countries are moving off of aws and Microsoft.
I invest in startups and companies at every stage are losing contracts in Europe specifically for this risk. I can’t say who but it’s a multi front trend.
It’s not clear whether Europe has the capability to compete with US tech right now.
It obviously does not. But, there is nothing preventing it. The US has given away all of our foreign scientists, if Europe wants them. All Europe has to do to take the lead in tech is ramp up research spending by an order of magnitude or two to match what the US used to spend (the US still outspends Europe on research, even after massive haphazard cuts and disruptions). Europe also has to welcome immigrants. Another thing many European countries have not always been great at, and some recently have become quite bad about. The regressive nationalist right is ascendant in many places, including some European countries.