Comment by cristoperb

20 hours 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/

Is it any good?

  • 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

  • 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