4 ms·
Swiss AI Initiative (2023)
- gnabgib 6mo ago(2023) Little said at the time (4 points, 1 comment) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38529956 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38529956
- TMWNN 6mo agoRelated 2023 discussion (22 comments): <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38523736 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38523736>
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- himata4113 6mo ago2023, but deadlines less than a month ago? Seems to be been updated continiously so (2023) doesn't really fit here.
- dtech 6mo agoI propose every Linux post should be tagged (1991) from now on
- shlewis 6mo agoWhy is this not written in German, I'm afraid to ask?
- dirasieb 6mo agoenglish is the lingua franca
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- kuerbel 6mo agoWhy is it not written in French? Or Italian? Or Romansh? Because Switzerland has four official languages and English makes it easier for everyone
- ale42 6mo agoNot 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.
- kuerbel 6mo agoheavy sigh I'm Swiss. I know. What I meant to say is that German is not the default language in Switzerland.
- j7ake 6mo agoMost researchers in Switzerland are non-Swiss, and many institutes have English as language of business
- lynguist 6mo agoStaff 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 6mo agobecause the brits won the language wars.
- gib444 6mo agoAnd the other wars ;)
- backscratches 6mo agoIt's a university in a French speaking region for one.
- PetitPrince 6mo agoNot 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 6mo agoBecause german is hard.
- rrgok 6mo agoWhy it has to be german?
- leoh 6mo agoWhat 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
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- cristoperb 6mo agoApertus 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/ https://apertvs.ai/pages/documentation/
- andsoitis 6mo agoIs it any good?
- cristoperb 6mo agoI 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 https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14233
- nicolaric 6mo agoit's quite bad tbh. i've tried it for some time and i expected much more...
- khalic 6mo agoYes 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 6mo agoTech report: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.14233 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.14233
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- andsoitis 6mo agoHas anything noteworthy come from this initiative? I have not heard of anything yet.
- throwpoaster 6mo agoMy standard question about Swiss engineering, “how many jewels?”, is failing me.