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Apertus – Open Foundation Model for Sovereign AI

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Re: Apertus – Open Foundation Model for Sovereign AI

#161

Post by mark_l_watson »

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".

I live in the USA and I use a European LLM as a daily driver: Proton’s lumo+ that does a good job packaging a Mistral model for general chat, with good searchable chat history — all with adequate privacy guarantees. Well worth the money.

I purchase open model tokens for agent programming assistance, and I like lumo+ for everything else.

Another option is DuckDuckGo’s Duck.ai subscription, but I slightly prefer ProtonMail’s lumo+ packaging as a product.

Re: Apertus – Open Foundation Model for Sovereign AI

#162

Post by maxloh »

typ wrote: post #125
maxloh wrote: post #8

Other fully open LLMs include Allen AI's OLMo 3.1 and MBZUAI's K2 Think V2, both of which have released their full training pipelines and datasets. Nvidia Nemotron is also an open training source model, though a portion of its dataset remains proprietary. Quoting lambda's comment: > Note that the Nemotron models are generally stronger than Olmo and K2 Think V2 (according to Artificial Analysis benchmarks), and there…

> an open training source model It's always funny to see people tempted to call open-blobs/open-weights, which are literally shareware like WinRAR or Adobe PDF Viewer, open source , and then need to invent a new term for what is actually open source.

Nemotron is vastly different from standard open-weight models. Its entire training pipeline is open-sourced, while other vendors typically only release the model weights.

Re: Apertus – Open Foundation Model for Sovereign AI

#163

Post by eric_cc »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #161
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".

I live in the USA and I use a European LLM as a daily driver: Proton’s lumo+ that does a good job packaging a Mistral model for general chat, with good searchable chat history — all with adequate privacy guarantees. Well worth the money. I purchase open model tokens for agent programming assistance, and I like lumo+ for everything else. Another option is DuckDuckGo’s Duck.ai subscription, but I slightly prefer Proton…

Do you go through all this trouble out of principle or necessity?

Re: Apertus – Open Foundation Model for Sovereign AI

#164

Post by eric_cc »

sscaryterry wrote: post #53
SubiculumCode wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give examples?

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.

> infantile shit

I think it’s valid to not trust the US with your data. But if the reason is some TDS “Orange Man Bad”, it’s you that’s acting infantile.

Re: Apertus – Open Foundation Model for Sovereign AI

#165

Post by mark_l_watson »

eric_cc wrote: post #163
mark_l_watson wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in the USA and I use a European LLM as a daily driver: Proton’s lumo+ that does a good job packaging a Mistral model for general chat, with good searchable chat history — all with adequate privacy guarantees. Well worth the money. I purchase open model tokens for agent programming assistance, and I like lumo+ for everything else. Another option is DuckDuckGo’s Duck.ai subscription, but I slightly prefer Proton…

Do you go through all this trouble out of principle or necessity?

Out of principle. Also, I am an old man and retired - makes it easier to give up a little bit of productivity.

Re: Apertus – Open Foundation Model for Sovereign AI

#166

Post by dofm »

jstummbillig wrote: post #114
dvt wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Instead we have a majority of society that wants to see AI fail. Do you talk to regular people? I work out of coffee shops routinely and literally like 90% of laptops have ChatGPT or Claude open. I was shocked at how many of my friends love the silliest of AI features (like Slack bot summarizing your day or your upcoming meetings), and a lot of decks, proposals, SOW's, etc. are (at least in part) generated with AI…

A quarter of US citizens use a Chatbot daily. https://www.pewresearch.org/chart/about-a-quarter-of-u-s-adu... It all, of course, depends on what people mean by "AI" (I think the question basically defeats itself, it's akin to asking someone about "databases", given that it covers image generation, self driving cars, TikTok feeds, drug discovery and chatbots) but AI sentiment at large is more negative than positive. h…

I think you meant "wary" of the consequences…

But this is one of those unique situations where wary (cautiousness, concernedness, preparedness, tinged with fear) and weary (exhaustion with a mental component) are overlapping into one horrible thing.

So I'm not correcting you because I think basically both are right: we are going through both of these at once because anxiety is what Scam and Wario in particular are selling.

Re: Apertus – Open Foundation Model for Sovereign AI

#167

Post by antoinealb »

einpoklum wrote: post #128
digitaltrees wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this a good faith question? It would take several hundred pages to document even a fraction of the violations. How about deporting people without a hearing or opportunity to present evidence about their charges. And then violating the judges order to turn the planes around. How about systematically ignoring judicial rulings. How about detaining people based on the color of their skin and spoken language/accent. Ho…

> How about deporting people without a hearing or opportunity to present evidence about their charges. Not to detract from your general point about the US, your first point is something that's happened recently in Switzerland: https://truthout.org/articles/swiss-police-arrest-deport-pal...

And a Swiss court decided that this was illegal and disproportionate [1]. Rule of law does not mean that nothing illegal happens in the country (that's obviously impossible to guarantee). It means illegal acts have consequences.

[1] https://www.bvger.ch/en/newsroom/media-releases/fedpol-must-...

Re: Apertus – Open Foundation Model for Sovereign AI

#168

Post by dofm »

dvt wrote: post #96
soundworlds wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Allen AI do not get enough love. They are doing GenAI how it should have always been done. In fact, if the frontier companies had taken their approach, it would have started much slower, but I think we would be far more advanced by 2035. Instead we have a majority of society that wants to see AI fail.

> Instead we have a majority of society that wants to see AI fail. Do you talk to regular people? I work out of coffee shops routinely and literally like 90% of laptops have ChatGPT or Claude open. I was shocked at how many of my friends love the silliest of AI features (like Slack bot summarizing your day or your upcoming meetings), and a lot of decks, proposals, SOW's, etc. are (at least in part) generated with AI…

Depends very much on the society and the context you catch it in.

Young people who want to have secure jobs and who have any kind of experience with creativity see AI coming for their livelihoods and their joy simultaneously.

Middle-aged IT industry people like me, many of us are grudgingly learning it but believe it to be an obvious net negative the way it is currently deployed; it feels like we're automating all the wrong stuff.

I wouldn't go around talking as if people think AI is great. A solid proportion of the population would be tempted to push AI influencers under buses and trains.

Re: Apertus – Open Foundation Model for Sovereign AI

#169

Post by 0gs »

dTal wrote: post #145
0gs wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Link? You have to tell us if you want to break through the noise!

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

Re: Apertus – Open Foundation Model for Sovereign AI

#170

Post by simonw »

reedciccio wrote: post #152
simonw wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It uses fineweb, which is derived from Common Crawl, which is an unlicensed scrape of web pages.

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.

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.)

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