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Apertus – Open Foundation Model for Sovereign AI

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Re: Apertus – Open Foundation Model for Sovereign AI

#181

Post by dofm »

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.

So far the smallest model I have actually seen behave in a way that feels consistent with the contemporary LLM chat experience is Gemma 4 12B. (The QAT build particularly). The E4B model is not bad — it has a good conversational flow, it responds well if nudged — but the 12B model feels capable.

Nothing below that really seems to be good for anything other than training for specific tasks. I have not been impressed by the earlier Apertus 8B model, which doesn't feel like it really responds to nudges.

I am a strong believer in smaller models, so I might try one of these out of curiosity to see if it might do useful things in limited contexts.

Re: Apertus – Open Foundation Model for Sovereign AI

#182

Post by EnergyAmy »

simonw wrote: post #170
reedciccio wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 benefit…

This is as ethical as it gets. They're getting compensated by being able to use the result of their work freely. This is the rising tide that lifts all boats.

Re: Apertus – Open Foundation Model for Sovereign AI

#183

Post by simonw »

EnergyAmy wrote: post #182
simonw wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 benefit…

This is as ethical as it gets. They're getting compensated by being able to use the result of their work freely . This is the rising tide that lifts all boats.

Good luck convincing the training data licensing holdouts of that.

Re: Apertus – Open Foundation Model for Sovereign AI

#184

Post by einpoklum »

antoinealb wrote: post #167
einpoklum wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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-...

Yes, that's true - but the expulsion did happen.

Was any of the people responsible for his detention and expulsion actually face consequences? e.g.

* Accused of a criminal offense,

* Dismissed from their positions, or

* Brought up on internal disciplinary charges?

and again - not detracting from the valid description of the horrid state of affairs in the US.

Re: Apertus – Open Foundation Model for Sovereign AI

#185

Post by reedciccio »

simonw wrote: post #170
reedciccio wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 benefit…

I don't know if it's ethically better to use LLMs trained on data licensed from X, Reddit, stackoverflow, Sony, CNN and all big content aggregators who will/have agreements with big tech. I'd prefer to focus on mechanisms to force reciprocating the donation: scrape and train at will, publish the models as open weights, at least. Anyway, the vegan LLMs exist, see the work of Pleias.ai.

Re: Apertus – Open Foundation Model for Sovereign AI

#186

Post by mwcampbell »

simonw wrote: post #183
EnergyAmy wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is as ethical as it gets. They're getting compensated by being able to use the result of their work freely . This is the rising tide that lifts all boats.

Good luck convincing the training data licensing holdouts of that.

Well, the frontier models aren't freely available in the same way that the training data (the public web) is; they're only available as a limited no-cost tier of a paid service.

There are models where the weights are released and you can run them locally, but one counter-argument I've seen is that these aren't really the models that people are excited about and making extraordinary claims about.

Re: Apertus – Open Foundation Model for Sovereign AI

#188

Post by bsder »

entrope wrote: post #150
bsder wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

For coding, Qwen3.6-27B with MTP should fit in 32GB with almost full context length for Unsloth's 5-bit quantization. That's my preferred choice for a local coding agent on similar hardware: the quality delta compared to a MoE model is IMO worth the extra wait. (And I haven't found a model with 70B-120B parameters that works better for coding.) For general chat, maybe gpt-oss-120b? It should have more general knowled…

Thanks. Even just a few anchor points gives me some context to get started.

Re: Apertus – Open Foundation Model for Sovereign AI

#189

Post by digitaltrees »

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...

Thanks for providing an example. I find the that situation to be drastically different. It was noncitizen non-resident visiting for a lecture with no deep ties to the country. The US deported residents, green card holders and citizens with no hearing to countries they had no connection to and didn't speak the local language, including some in Africa.

An equal example in Europe would need the facts to be more similar

Re: Apertus – Open Foundation Model for Sovereign AI

#190

Post by digitaltrees »

eric_cc wrote: post #164
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.

> 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.

You could get away with throwing the TDS label around during the first term but now the con is tired and worn out. This term has resulted in the dangers his own first cabinet warned about. He single handedly destroyed the global world order with the US at the center. He is responsible for a full 1/3 of all national debt. Almost every us industry is losing global market share accept AI and He just undermined the world's faith in US led AI with time anthropic export control.

I could go on and on.

HN should be a place for serious good faith analysis not shrill insults. So leave the trump derangement comments out of the dialog next time.

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