Switzerland Built Its Own AI Model — and Gave It Away to Everyone
Switzerland built its own AI model — and gave it away to everyone.
In September 2025, EPFL, ETH Zurich and the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) released Apertus — Switzerland's first large-scale, open, multilingual language model.
What makes it different
Unlike ChatGPT or Claude, the entire development process behind Apertus — its architecture, model weights, training data and methods — is openly accessible and fully documented. Nothing is hidden.
The model comes in two sizes, with 8 billion and 70 billion parameters, and covers more than 1,000 languages — including ones long underrepresented in AI, such as Swiss German and Romansh.
For Swiss professionals, Apertus is a development worth knowing about: proof that world-class AI can be built here, on Swiss values of transparency and trust.
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Sources: EPFL, ETH Zurich, swissinfo.ch.
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