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Apertus – Open Foundation Model for Sovereign AI

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Re: Apertus – Open Foundation Model for Sovereign AI

#191

Post by digitaltrees »

SwellJoe wrote: post #119
digitaltrees wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The kind of funding it takes to take on US tech corporations, especially in AI, will be astronomical. For an open source solution, it will take state action, and given how unpopular AI is with average folks (an entirely reasonable position for average folks to take when they see the new robber barons who're leading the AI charge), I'm not confident there's political will for it. If a few of the larger rich European n…

My rule is, if someone has done it then it's possible which means I can do it too.

Re: Apertus – Open Foundation Model for Sovereign AI

#192

Post by simonw »

reedciccio wrote: post #185
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…

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.

Pleias is definitely the most promising.

I haven't seen a model trained on that corpus since late 2024: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/5/pleias-llms/ - I may have missed something though.

Re: Apertus – Open Foundation Model for Sovereign AI

#193

Post by soundworlds »

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…

I work in IT, part of which is AI training - so I see how widespread these tools are. But surveys have shown there is a stark difference in how many people use it and how many people trust it. In Australia, 4% of people say they trust AI companies with data [1]

This is also one of the first "new technologies" that the older generations are far more optimistic about than younger generations. In the US, only 22% of Gen Z are optimistic about the technology, and that number is dropping [2]

[1] https://www.oaic.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0023/264362/A...

[2] https://news.gallup.com/poll/708224/gen-adoption-steady-skep...

Re: Apertus – Open Foundation Model for Sovereign AI

#194

Post by reedciccio »

simonw wrote: post #192
reedciccio wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Pleias is definitely the most promising. I haven't seen a model trained on that corpus since late 2024: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/5/pleias-llms/ - I may have missed something though.

I think their business model is to work on specialized models rather than general purpose. See https://pleias.ai/blog/sillon-ratp and the focus on synthetic datasets for specific personas.

Re: Apertus – Open Foundation Model for Sovereign AI

#196

Post by Dorialexander »

simonw wrote: post #192
reedciccio wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Pleias is definitely the most promising. I haven't seen a model trained on that corpus since late 2024: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/5/pleias-llms/ - I may have missed something though.

hi, so Pleias co-founder here.

Common Corpus is commonly used now in pretraining, including by close labs, but rarely as the only source (which would be the actual ethical commitment).

Like most people training efficient models we move toward synthetic pretraining, but still maintaining our committment for data research and releasability. Lead current project is SYNTH, for now based on Wikipedia but we'll generalize with seeds from Common Corpus.

Re: Apertus – Open Foundation Model for Sovereign AI

#197

Post by antoinealb »

einpoklum wrote: post #184
antoinealb wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The agency who arrested him have been sentenced to pay him 12k$ + court fees. There is a criminal case ongoing against Della Valle, former head of Switzerland's federal police. It only started after the administrative ruling and parliamentary investigation.

Re: Apertus – Open Foundation Model for Sovereign AI

#198

Post by toss1 »

dofm wrote: post #146
toss1 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an interesting and possibly useful distinction , but it seems unique to you. Spreading it as "We should categorize the AIs this way" would be a good argument. But the way SOTA is generally understood by other users of the language, it refers to exactly the team, technology, & techniques defining the cutting edge in any field, regardless of the whether the technology & techniques are available outside of that t…

Not so much, it turns out. https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/239963/do-state-...

The Stack Exchange poster seems to be confusing "State Of The Art" with "Best Practices".

Meanwhile, Wikipedia specifically calls out "Cutting Edge" as specifically synonymous with "SOTA" [0], Cambridge defines it as "the best and most modern of its type" with zero reference to general vs limited availability in the definition or any of it's numerous examples [1], and the same from Merriam-Webster [2].

Having studied and worked in multiple technology fields ranging from software to mechanical & aero engineering for four+ decades, your post is literally the first time I've ever seen anyone even try to make such a distinction between SOTA vs CE. I think it could be a very useful distinction if it were to get into common usage, but IME it is far closer to unique than common. The sibling comments to your assertions show pretty much the same thing - it would be useful, but it isn't common.

Promote it as common and you'll find pushback. Promote it as novel and useful, and it'll likely spread.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_of_the_art

[1] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/state-of...

[2] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/state%20of%20the%...

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