Top
Best
New

Posted by T-A 20 hours ago

Apertus – Open Foundation Model for Sovereign AI(apertvs.ai)
503 points | 168 comments
maxloh 20 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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48492439

soundworlds 17 hours ago||
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.

dvt 14 hours ago|||
> 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.

dofm 4 hours ago|||
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.

dd8601fn 2 hours ago||
Kids are using it a ton, too.

Everyone wants at least some of the utility.

Few want to reach the end of the road we’re said to be walking. AI companies and the CEOs of megacorps. Everyone else is being sold a doomsday scenario (true or not).

jstummbillig 12 hours ago||||
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.

dofm 4 hours ago||
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.

johngossman 5 hours ago||||
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.
alfiedotwtf 10 hours ago||||
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!

rz2k 7 hours ago||
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?

scjody 5 hours ago||||
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.

apercu 3 hours ago|||
Informed society is getting tired of unethical finance bro technocrats buying political influence and power with ill-gotten gains.
a_136_chiffa 5 hours ago||||
LLMs were invented by AI2, before Transformers were a thing - with RNN-based ELMO.
polytely 8 hours ago||||
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.
waffletower 2 hours ago||
I don't think Dario is completely evil, but he can't see his obvious naiveté that the rest of us see clearly (vis a vis the Trump administration), and his paternal hubris, only Anthropic should win and control AI, should be perceived as far worse than Bill Gate's desire to control the internet in the 90s. The fact that Microsoft invested so heavily in OpenAI blinded me to Anthropic's potential villainy for years.
sawjet 14 hours ago||||
Is there any evidence that "a majority of society wants AI to fail"

Or is it just vibes?

markerz 13 hours ago|||
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-...

watwut 10 hours ago||
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.
intended 9 hours ago|||
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48573332

Was discussed just recently, and there are multiple articles and surveys on AI sentiment.

hit8run 15 hours ago||||
Care to elaborate on this?
AndrewKemendo 16 hours ago|||
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.

typ 10 hours ago|||
> 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.

maxloh 4 hours ago||
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.
wrs 2 hours ago||
Right, thus it is actually “open source”, and they shouldn’t need to invent a new term “open training source”. But the others have already effectively trashed the meaning of “open source”.
vcryan 17 hours ago||
Maybe I'll give Nemotron another try. Yesterday I used the latest one on OpenRouter and it was bad - worse than StepFun
SwellJoe 20 hours ago||
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?).
nezuzen 19 hours ago|
"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".

mark_l_watson 5 hours ago|||
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.

eric_cc 4 hours ago||
Do you go through all this trouble out of principle or necessity?
mark_l_watson 4 hours ago||
Out of principle. Also, I am an old man and retired - makes it easier to give up a little bit of productivity.
kitd 11 hours ago||||
The law varies from country to country, but at least I vote for the legislators creating the laws governing my local sovereign AI.
tensor 13 hours ago||||
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.
digitaltrees 19 hours ago||||
The rule of law exists in other countries in a way it does not in the US right now.
SubiculumCode 18 hours ago||
Can you give examples?
digitaltrees 13 hours ago|||
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.

einpoklum 10 hours ago||
> 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...

antoinealb 4 hours ago|||
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-...

intended 9 hours ago|||
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.

sinuhe69 15 hours ago||||
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.

brandensilva 17 hours ago||||
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.
sscaryterry 17 hours ago||||
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.

eric_cc 4 hours ago|||
> 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.

sscaryterry 4 hours ago||
I don't know what else to call it? Seriously, 2 words, and I'm sure it is spot-on.
SubiculumCode 16 hours ago|||
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
digitaltrees 13 hours ago|||
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.

rob74 7 hours ago||||
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.
SwellJoe 16 hours ago||||
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.

digitaltrees 13 hours ago|||
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.

jimbokun 15 hours ago|||
It’s not clear whether Europe has the capability to compete with US tech right now.
SwellJoe 15 hours ago|||
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.
digitaltrees 13 hours ago||
I am going to ramp up building open source alternatives to every part of the stack. I am encouraging every YC founder to do the same. I am buying as much hardware as I can afford to have my own inference and training stack and funding researchers at Duke and CM to strengthen local and open source AI.

I am also assembling the largest in home robotics training data set available which will be open source.

Want to help?

advael 9 hours ago|||
Kinda, yea. I've never been able to afford to fully prioritize values-alignment in my work, but it is something I care about, and building anything proprietary and US-controlled feels increasingly bad, because even if a company's mission isn't evil, the state has demonstrated a strong willingness to force their hand if they can be useful to them at all, and punish them arbitrarily if they do anything that the ruling party dislikes. I do have bills to pay, but if you can meet my relatively (as tech workers go) modest needs and have a real plan to make something that enables rather than impedes digital sovereignty, I'd be interested in hearing what I could do to help
SwellJoe 11 hours ago|||
The kind of funding it takes to take on US tech corporations, especially in AI, will be astronomical. For an open source solution, it will take state action, and given how unpopular AI is with average folks (an entirely reasonable position for average folks to take when they see the new robber barons who're leading the AI charge), I'm not confident there's political will for it. If a few of the larger rich European nations really committed to funding research at a level competitive with the US, though, even if not specifically AI-related, the result would be an eventual end to US tech hegemony.

I was hoping the European AI companies and projects like Mistral and Apertus would, you know, do something good. But, their models trail not only US models, but Chinese models, including smaller ones, by a significant amount. I guess there's also the ethical component. Mistral is reportedly not plagiarizing like US companies, and isn't distilling US models like the Chines companies. Cheating gives one a leg up if there are no referees.

Anyway, I work for a robotics company, and I'm always interested in what's happening with open robotics stuff, including AI.

markhahn 13 hours ago|||
any US tech? not even for specific purposes? yeah, if there was some kind of forcefield around the US, most of the world would have tech troubles at one level or another. but so would the US.

and really, the topic here is reducing a transgressive President from infringing tech activities elsewhere (used to be mainly about surveillance, but then trump happened).

iwontberude 16 hours ago|||
It’s been cooked for longer than Trump. Al Gore won in 2000 and they stole the election. Everything that followed has been a complete fuckfest.
mannanj 3 hours ago|||
How about spying on, experimenting on, and conducting in-person psyops on a US citizen for reasons of calling the Spy Agencies terrorist organizations on social media and whistleblowing their online astroturfing accounts? My whistleblowing consisted of calling particular online accounts as deep state accounts, and I was reaching thousands of voices.

They decided that spying on me in a commune in Hawaii, and then following me after to other public spaces was fine. I'm certain something was put in my food based on behavior I saw in communal meals, and I can't say I took video or photo evidence though I wish I did.

I'm of Pakistani descent, held a former secret clearance, and I did not break any oaths or violate any laws though the way I was treated was certainly how the above person described rule of law: our spy agencies for example operate completely without accountability and regularly commit atrocious behavior against US citizens beyond just me.

MrDrMcCoy 17 hours ago||||
Iceland and Switzerland are probably the best places to keep your data safe. I'd put Norway, Sweden, Germany, and the Netherlands after that, though I don't have much specifics on how good they are at privacy these days.
SilverSlash 16 hours ago||
lol the new "swiss banks". store all your dirty data in digital swiss lockers
OkWing99 15 hours ago||||
I think US is the only country that's asked to limit their frontier model access based on the Citizenship of the user.

Let's say Gemini gets to AGI by tomorrow, will my Google account access, or Gemini apps access and data be blocked if I'm not a US citizen? (Anthropic did it with a 5% better model).

If US is classifying the model access based on citizenship, that's similar to treating it as a Defense capability.

sawjet 14 hours ago||
I, as a US citizen, also cannot access claude fable.
yathaid 13 hours ago|||
You cannot access Fable because Anthropic can't reliably tell whether you are a US citizen. The govt order is based on export controls to non-US citizens.

You can already imagine Anthropic working with a bunch of shady brokers to "remedy" this situation.

bloppe 3 hours ago||
https://x.com/AmrithRamkumar/status/2067059417678336455

This particular order wasn't actually about citizenship at all. It seems the administration simply believed restricting the order to non-citizens would make it easier to defend in court, but they made it knowing full well that the only way to implement it would be to completely shut off access for everyone.

PeterStuer 12 hours ago||||
Most people have had to reluctantly accept their own totalitarian state will control them. They do not want another state to have the same or even more power over them.
AndrewKemendo 16 hours ago||||
No country is safe. You need to host your own end to end on your own infrastructure if you want to be free.

Stallman was correct in the 80s and is correct now about libre software

jhancock 17 hours ago|||
From a legal perspective the US may be safer than other places if the US is the one seeking your data. The US doesn't need legal process to authorize digging into your foreign server.

From a practical perspective, I'm not sure any servers are safe anywhere...depending on who may want your data.

markhahn 13 hours ago||
I guess you mean assuming your data is stored somewhere in the clear (and whole).

I'm surprised there isn't a lot more attention to encrypted, distributed, erasure-encoded stores.

mrshu 19 hours ago||
By far the most impactful product of the Apretus project are the people. To quote a memorable line from Dominique Paul (https://www.thisiscrispin.com/):

> What most people miss IMO is that this is not a team who is doing this for the fourth time like virtually any other LLM provider and who could learn from its own past experiences. I bet if the team would do another model training they could get way better results at one fourth of the costs.

pferde 20 hours ago||
For a model that claims to focus on many languages, it's quite unreliable when it comes to simple questions like "how to say X in language Y" or "how to conjugate verb X in language Y". It keeps hallucinating words that do not exist, and when corrected, it only hallucinates a new lie.
8note 19 hours ago|
it probably doesnt know what language each set of words is referencing.

i doubt they are including a lot of training data labeled with the language.

"how to say X in language Y" is a different task from saying X in language Y

einpoklum 10 hours ago||
Actually, it isn't all that different. There are only two words separating "how to say X in language Y" from "say X in language Y". And this "vulgar" metric is actually quite relevant for an LLM, which answers based on conversational context.
throwaw12 20 hours ago||
Looks like their instruct models are Llama3.1 fine tune from last year. Is there any progress on new models?

My last hope for soverign AI is from Chinese open models

kordlessagain 20 hours ago|
Sovereign AI is not about using just one model. It's about using the right model for the right job, and getting them to talk through the solution TOGETHER before presenting the answer.

If you want to mix models like this, check out https://github.com/deepbluedynamics/nemesis8

wg0 13 hours ago||
You might dismiss it as nothing but the Linux analogy does not work here either. It is more than that and direct threat to commercial AI labs and their business model. These labs are milking bunch of foundational papers for years now and the end is near.

Going forward would be such open source, open data and open recipe models possibly someday even with the training being crowd sourced if not inference like the BitTorrent model.

Lastly, even Chinese models (GLM, Deepseek, MiMax) work really really good and any user would testify that they do not miss OpenAI/Anthropic/Gemini at all if they're using those Chinese models which is argument enough that with such models, no one is going to miss Chinese models as well.

zitterbewegung 16 hours ago||
Sort of interesting license not sure if anyone will do it long term.

The training data and the Apertus LLM may contain or generate information that directly or indirectly refers to an identifiable individual (Personal Data). You process Personal Data as independent controller in accordance with applicable data protection law. SNAI will regularly provide a file with hash values for download which you can apply as an output filter to your use of our Apertus LLM. The file reflects data protection deletion requests which have been addressed to SNAI as the developer of the Apertus LLM. It allows you to remove Personal Data contained in the model output. We strongly advise downloading and applying this output filter from SNAI every six months following the release of the model.

reconnecting 19 hours ago||
A chat interface where you can try Apertus:

https://chat.publicai.co

einpoklum 10 hours ago|
You will need to register with an email and password though, i.e. your sessions will be recorded and identified.

Also even after you do that, and start a chat, you currently get:

  "JSON.parse: unexpected character at line 1 column 1 of the JSON data"
so it's not quite there yet.
Bobaso 6 hours ago||
Apertus V1 performance were sub-par. The Team is working on v2 ATM. Looking forward to testing it.
khalic 5 hours ago|
I don't know, I'm implementing a translation system right now, and Apertus is very good for the model size. I wished they added some chain of thought training to increase precision and context understanding.
yreg 20 hours ago|
previous thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45108401
More comments...