Need for speed
Despite the ethical appeal of Apertus, it will still need to compete with rivals in terms of AI inference. The notion that organizations needed to go to large closed-source LLM makers to get this was mistaken, according to Antoine Bosselut, assistant professor at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), which also collaborated on the Swiss LLM.
“Over the last few years, we heard this narrative that commercial LLM providers were light years ahead of anything that anybody else could create. What I hope we’ve shown here today is that that’s not necessarily the case and that this gap is far less wide than we had imagined,” he said in a promotional video.
“Apertus demonstrates that generative AI can be both powerful and open,” said Bosselut. “The release of Apertus is not a final step, rather it’s the beginning of a journey, a long-term commitment to open, trustworthy, and sovereign AI foundations, for the public good worldwide.”
