Bravo, Switzerland! Apertus is here – the first major open-source language model from Switzerland!
A big compliment to EPFL, ETH Zurich, and the entire Swiss AI Initiative. With Apertus, the first large, open language model from Switzerland was released yesterday. A milestone that shows Switzerland can not only keep up but also actively set accents in the international AI competition.
For us at Meeting Metrics, initiatives like this are central: they strengthen Switzerland as an innovation hub and create the foundation for trustworthy AI. At the same time, we want to clarify some misunderstandings around Apertus.
Is Apertus the "Swiss ChatGPT" – and does it finally understand dialect?
Many posts on social media celebrate Apertus as the model that finally perfectly understands Swiss German. It's not that simple.
Apertus is an open Swiss LLM and thus directly competes with open-source models like Llama (Meta), Mistral, or Gemma (Google) – not with closed systems like ChatGPT. Its major uniqueness lies less in dialect language mastery and more in the transparent and legally clean data basis on which it was trained. This is the real breakthrough for trustworthy AI.
In our tests, it showed: the Swiss German capabilities are comparable to other models – ChatGPT and larger international LLMs sometimes even perform better here.
Why we at Meeting Metrics (still) don’t use Apertus
Our platform analyzes and summarizes meetings automatically. For this, we need models that operate at the absolute performance limit. Apertus is a big step forward but currently not the first choice for our specific use case:
- Accuracy: According to its own benchmarks, the 70B version of Apertus is on par with Llama 3.1 70B – a model that has been on the market for over a year. Newer open-source models currently deliver better results for us.
- Context window: Apertus processes about 65,000 tokens (approximately 1.5 to 2 hours of meeting). Models like Llama 3.3 or Gemma already handle 128,000 tokens and can thus analyze 4 to 5-hour meetings – a clear advantage for our customers.
- Dialect: We have not yet identified a significant advantage in Swiss German.
A milestone for the Swiss tech scene
Even though we are not currently using Apertus, we see the release as an important impulse for the Swiss AI location. A large, fully open and transparent model "Made in Switzerland" is a decisive step towards sovereign and trustworthy AI.
We warmly congratulate the team behind Apertus and will follow its further development with great interest.
