Hacker News
Swiss AI Initiative (2023)
81 points by doener
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25 comments
cristoperb
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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.
andsoitis
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Is it any good?
cristoperb
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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.
khalic
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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
himata4113
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2023, but deadlines less than a month ago? Seems to be been updated continiously so (2023) doesn't really fit here.
andsoitis
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Has anything noteworthy come from this initiative? I have not heard of anything yet.
gnabgib
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(2023) Little said at the time (4 points, 1 comment) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38529956
TMWNN
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Related 2023 discussion (22 comments): <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38523736>
shlewis
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Why is this not written in German, I'm afraid to ask?
kuerbel
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Why is it not written in French? Or Italian? Or Romansh? Because Switzerland has four official languages and English makes it easier for everyone
ale42
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Not really. It's because the target audience is more academic/scientific rather than the Swiss population at large. In the latter case, it would be in the local languages. The law is relatively clear for this. English is not accepted in Switzerland as a replacement language for the "local" ones, although many people can speak or at least understand some English.
j7ake
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Most researchers in Switzerland are non-Swiss, and many institutes have English as language of business
lynguist
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Staff nationality of Swiss higher education institutions:
- Universities: 55% Swiss, 45% foreign - Universities of applied sciences: 75% Swiss, 25% foreign - Universities of teacher education: 87% Swiss, 13% foreign - Professors: 49% Swiss, 51% foreign - PhDs/scientific collaborators: 30% Swiss, 70% foreign - Professors of ETH Zurich: 31% Swiss, 69% foreign
backscratches
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It's a university in a French speaking region for one.