Apertus: Democratizing Open and Compliant LLMs For Global Language Environments

This presentation introduces Apertus, a fully transparent large language model initiative developed through collaboration between EPFL, ETH Zürich, and CSCS, representing a significant public-sector response to the concentration of AI development within private corporations. The talk examines its origin and fundamental challenges in current LLM deployment, such as opacity of training data, limited multilingual representation, and proprietary control. The initiative demonstrates how public research institutions can develop competitive language models while adhering to stringent ethical standards, including training exclusively on public data with copyright compliance and supporting over 1,000 languages.