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Posted by T-A 22 hours ago

Apertus – Open Foundation Model for Sovereign AI(apertvs.ai)
503 points | 168 commentspage 2
jawns 20 hours ago|
I am curious about how opt-outs and PII removal work.

Who confirms those requests are legit?

naklitechie 14 hours ago||
What's the community's take on Sovereign AI being funded by states around the world?

Why the emphasis on sovereign? Open is good enough. No?

khalic 7 hours ago||
It was in reaction to the possible threat of main actors restricting use. The latest US gov stunt with Fable just made it concrete and pressing.
luplex 9 hours ago||
Sovereignty is a political buzzword. From the political point of view, you want your country to be as independent as possible. This means you need the capabilities to build and deploy good AI models. Initiatives like this are more about capability-building and less about LLM-building.

Why do we need capabilities in Europe? Because Trump and Xi can't be trusted to keep providing us with new frontier models in the next years.

trvz 22 hours ago||
The previous version of this model has been pretty bad, but claimed to adhere to copyright laws. However, based on my testing, that's not true either. So in my view this is completely useless.
dofm 2 hours ago||
So far the smallest model I have actually seen behave in a way that feels consistent with the contemporary LLM chat experience is Gemma 4 12B. (The QAT build particularly). The E4B model is not bad — it has a good conversational flow, it responds well if nudged — but the 12B model feels capable.

Nothing below that really seems to be good for anything other than training for specific tasks. I have not been impressed by the earlier Apertus 8B model, which doesn't feel like it really responds to nudges.

I am a strong believer in smaller models, so I might try one of these out of curiosity to see if it might do useful things in limited contexts.

embedding-shape 22 hours ago|||
As long as the following remains true, this release ends up a bigger contribution to science at large than most other models trained "behind closed doors":

> Fully open model: open weights + open data + full training details including all data and training recipes

coder543 21 hours ago||
Is a recipe useful if no one likes it?

There are equally open, much more useful models out there: https://artificialanalysis.ai/?models=nvidia-nemotron-3-ultr...

khalic 7 hours ago||
Nemotron still has partial closed data. Having multiple models to chose from is a good thing
simonw 21 hours ago|||
It uses fineweb, which is derived from Common Crawl, which is an unlicensed scrape of web pages.
reedciccio 7 hours ago||
You don't need a license to scrape the public web and analyze it, turn it into tokens and other transformations. Let's not expand copyright beyond the horrible monster it already is.
simonw 5 hours ago||
I think it's likely that US law will continue to find training on scraped, unlicensed data to be legal.

That doesn't mean much to the many people I know of who refuse to use a technology that they see as being unethically created using the work of others without compensating them.

I continue to hope that someone will train a "vegan" model on licensed or out-of-copyright data so those people can experience the benefits of this class of technology.

(I compare them to vegans because, like vegans, I think their ethical position is credible and has merit even though I do not choose the same ethical framework for myself.)

EnergyAmy 28 minutes ago||
This is as ethical as it gets. They're getting compensated by being able to use the result of their work freely. This is the rising tide that lifts all boats.
simonw 8 minutes ago||
Good luck convincing the training data licensing holdouts of that.
markhahn 15 hours ago||
I'm curious how you test; could you explain? Do you have a set of factoids that should be subject to copyright, but are somehow literally (whole work) generated by the model in question?
neom 19 hours ago||
I'm curious to know what stuff like this means for cohere? Their whole value prop is Sovereign AI. It seems they spent a lot of money developing models but own none of their own infra, what is the point of a country spending a lot of money on coheres solutions when stuff like this is becoming increasingly available and usable? Feels like I must be missing something here??
uberex 14 hours ago||
Being childish I https://oss.zuericitygpt.ch/?q=hello+talk+like+a+pirate
atemerev 22 hours ago||
I use it extensively. It is not ready for agentic use, but as a generic driving model for RAG use cases, it is pretty competent. You can build useful software with it.
MASNeo 21 hours ago|
I use Apertus including as the driver for an agent, not a coding agent. Find it useful enough. What was your Challenge?
atemerev 10 hours ago||
Legal consulting.
dTal 21 hours ago||
It's good that there is a movement for open LLMs, but it's not where the battleground is right now. The battleground is local vs service LLMs, and we are losing that battle badly despite all the software being here now and viable, entirely because UX sucks.

How many normal people do you know who use "ChatGPT"? A lot, probably.

How many even know what "Gemma" is, let alone have downloaded llama.cpp, a GGUF file from Hugginface, and run "llama-server" from a text console with all the correct command arguments? How many are thinking about this use case when speccing out their next computer? Where is the breathless marketing copy boasting x tok/s?

We are sleepwalking into slavery.

627467 20 hours ago||
"Normal people" have never bothered to host their own: photos, music, videos, documents, comunications, etc. To the point that for many their computer is essentially a thin client into someone else's server. Why would we think this same people would care about "personal" inference?
trollbridge 18 hours ago|||
Normal people can go open an account at DeepSeek or Xiaomi and chat away for free. Or, for that matter, a couple other models like z.ai's (GLM-5.2 isn't in the free tier, though, but neither is GPT-5.5-Pro), or Qwen, which does have 3.7-Max for free with no account on their chatbot interface.

Yes, I realise this isn't "running a local model", but it's using models that can be grabbed and run locally. For my pipelines, I feel far more confidence when I use an open model (even one like GLM-5.2 that would be expensive for me to run) since I have a backup plan if the hosted/cloud option becomes unworkable for me. If that happens to me with Opus, I have zero options.

cdata 19 hours ago|||
If our strategy to avoid "slavery" involves "normal people" taking the local-vs-managed choice seriously, we have already lost.

This choice is made for us. The deciding factors will be convenience and economics.

My sense is that just like Web 2.0 SaaS we are destined for servitude.

A better strategy is to play an assymetrical game IMO. Don't let your would-be master write the rules by which you play.

yeeeloit 18 hours ago||
> A better strategy is to play an assymetrical game IMO. Don't let your would-be master write the rules by which you play.

What do you mean by this? Do you have an example in the given context?

At1C 11 hours ago||
[dead]
8note 20 hours ago|||
normal people dont really have the hardware to run local models
dTal 9 hours ago|||
Anyone with an M-series Apple computer can run something very competently. Mac Pro users can run 30B class models which is good enough for the vast majority of practical everyday purposes, far better than the original ChatGPT was. Anyone with a gaming computer is in a similar situation. The rest of us can still run stuff, just not as big or as fast.
sosodev 19 hours ago||||
They have it, we just haven’t enabled them. The smart model with a chat box is the wrong abstraction for local. Ideally we would have it built into applications as a clear and easy to use opt-in feature. Like allowing a user to index a folder on their hard drive and then search it semantically via embeddings. You could do that on fairly low end hardware these days. Like 2GB of RAM with any processor made within the last 10 years.
manithree 19 hours ago||||
They may not right now, but the whole point of Microsoft's Copilot+ PC standard (even though it's somewhat anemic) is to run models locally. Apple Silicon with enough unified memory is capable. Not to mention modern iPhones and Pixels have fairly capable NPUs and routinely run local models. So, we may not be to the point where most normal people have the hardware to run local models, but it is rapidly approaching.
Danox 16 hours ago||||
As time goes on, they’re almost certainly will be very capable local models in the long run we (general computer users) aren’t going back to the era of mainframe computing no matter how much OpenAI, Meta or Google would like us to.
dTal 9 hours ago||
We aren't? Are you sure? Where is your email inbox? Where are your backups? Where are your music files? For most people the answer to all those is "someone else's computer".
trollbridge 18 hours ago|||
Gamers can run Qwen 3.6 quantised models now.

You would also be shocked what's possible on a 64GB Mac Studio, which isn't that unattainable.

conception 19 hours ago|||
Google Edge Gallery is turn key for people and on the device most people chatgpt on. Just like with most Google Stuff “edge gallery” is maybe the worst name possible for “run AI on your phone”!
theptip 20 hours ago|||
Why do you feel the important part _now_ is where the weights get run?

I can see this as a future battleground but access to frontier models (which you cannot run locally) seems a lot more relevant today.

dTal 8 hours ago||
Because the local LLMs available today are already fantastic, and the difference between no LLM and an open weights LLM is much smaller than the gap between an open LLM and a so-called "frontier" model.

It's important that people get used to the idea that your interactions with a language model are a highly personal thing. LLMs can perceive and categorize us in ways we can't even imagine, far more violently than the simple algorithmic feeds which have already corroded public discourse so much. LLMs can control us. LLMs warp the information landscape more radically than even the internet did. Even now you are likely underestimating their role in future society.

The principles of software freedom are becoming existentially important.

itkovian_ 19 hours ago|||
You can’t run a closed llm locally. Strange to frame the dichotomy as between local and open. One begets the other.
idiotsecant 21 hours ago|||
Better UX does not buy you a datacenter farm to train state of the art cutting edge models. Right now the only people who can do that are the technobility class.
dTal 20 hours ago|||
It does not, but it might encourage more people to care. Worrying about training is a luxury when you are starting from a baseline of "OpenAI spies upon me and controls my access". Let's focus on getting every Tom, Dick and Harry 1) on board with LLMs, because they're happening, 2) habitually using local software.
trollbridge 18 hours ago|||
The same used to be true of being able to program computers and compile software.

Of course the frontier will always be unattainable, but that's like pointing out that I couldn't buy my own Cray supercomputer.

azinman2 20 hours ago|||
> We are sleepwalking into slavery.

That’s a bit hyperbolic…

MrDrMcCoy 19 hours ago||
Some hyperbole is useful. The problem is real and serious, though short of the specific verbiage.
0gs 20 hours ago|||
it's funny because i made this thing (called enough) that aims to make it easy for non-technical people to get up and running with local models quickly, but it is impossible to figure out how to break through the noise. every thread and comment like this breaks my heart a lil bit
dTal 9 hours ago||
Link? You have to tell us if you want to break through the noise!
0gs 5 hours ago||
sure! github.com/0gsd/enough ; enough.support has some FAQs. i did post a Show HN on it and i intend to do so again sooner than later haha
double0jimb0 21 hours ago|||
Yea, anyone who understands what makes products actually usable is opting to get paid for said skill.
bsder 19 hours ago|||
> we are losing that battle badly despite all the software being here now and viable, entirely because UX sucks.

Yep. I'm an old time Linux sysadmin, but I am COMPLETELY baffled as to what I can or cannot run on my 32GB R9700 with 128GB main CPU memory.

If I want something Claude or Codex like what do I use that would be useful? If I want a chat system, what do I use? Images--apparently ComfyUI for setup but after that what do I do?

I don't even mind spinning up something in the cloud for a bit, but I need to know how I'm going to get data up and down without racking up massive bandwidth charges.

I'd love to do some tinkering, but the field is moving so fast and so full of charlatans that cleaning the dross out is almost impossible.

entrope 7 hours ago|||
For coding, Qwen3.6-27B with MTP should fit in 32GB with almost full context length for Unsloth's 5-bit quantization. That's my preferred choice for a local coding agent on similar hardware: the quality delta compared to a MoE model is IMO worth the extra wait. (And I haven't found a model with 70B-120B parameters that works better for coding.) For general chat, maybe gpt-oss-120b? It should have more general knowledge than a 30B-class model; I've used it to suggest itineraries for trips and to review the completeness of small requests for proposals.

I don't have recommendations for images because I haven't played with those.

markhahn 15 hours ago|||
these days, even completely mainstream distros (Fedora here) include ollama, which leverages a wide range of hardware and range of models. (it's generally useful to install a more recent ollama, though.) there are free coding harnesses too.
dTal 8 hours ago||
ollama is just a wrapper around llama.cpp, and a pretty janky one at that. You're much better off using it directly.
wmf 20 hours ago||
LM Studio
JSR_FDED 17 hours ago||
From a sovereign AI perspective, how does this compare to Mistral?
luplex 9 hours ago|
It's a different country, and Switzerland is not even in the EU.
JSR_FDED 9 hours ago||
True. What France (as an EU member) and Switzerland (not as an EU member) share is a desire for sovereign AI. I am interested how their efforts compare, and how their LLMs thus far compare.
holistio 19 hours ago||
Knowledge cutoff is March 2024. Incredible.
uberex 14 hours ago|
Does anyone care about this anymore with context windows and tool harnesses.
pizlonator 16 hours ago|
> compliant at scale

The jokes write themselves.

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