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Apertus – Open Foundation Model for Sovereign AI

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Re: Apertus – Open Foundation Model for Sovereign AI

#101

Post by markhahn »

jhancock wrote: post #75
nezuzen wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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".

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.

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.

Re: Apertus – Open Foundation Model for Sovereign AI

#102

Post by markhahn »

trvz wrote: post #3

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.

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?

Re: Apertus – Open Foundation Model for Sovereign AI

#103

Post by digitaltrees »

SubiculumCode wrote: post #79
sscaryterry wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

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.

Re: Apertus – Open Foundation Model for Sovereign AI

#104

Post by yathaid »

sawjet wrote: post #93
OkWing99 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I, as a US citizen, also cannot access claude fable.

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.

Re: Apertus – Open Foundation Model for Sovereign AI

#105

Post by tensor »

nezuzen wrote: post #16
SwellJoe wrote: post #12

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…

"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".

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.

Re: Apertus – Open Foundation Model for Sovereign AI

#106

Post by wg0 »

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.

Re: Apertus – Open Foundation Model for Sovereign AI

#107

Post by digitaltrees »

SwellJoe wrote: post #81
SubiculumCode wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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…

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.

Re: Apertus – Open Foundation Model for Sovereign AI

#108

Post by markhahn »

bsder wrote: post #59
dTal wrote: post #20

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…

> 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 th…

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.

Re: Apertus – Open Foundation Model for Sovereign AI

#109

Post by markhahn »

nisten wrote: post #56

As an opesource AI researcher with a lot of models and datasets on huggingface I am very appreciative of these types of project but we are ignoring the elephant in the room here ( or lack of ) the swiss have no gpus

why do you say the Swiss have no gpus?

Re: Apertus – Open Foundation Model for Sovereign AI

#110

Post by digitaltrees »

SwellJoe wrote: post #90
jimbokun wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not clear whether Europe has the capability to compete with US tech right now.

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…

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?

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