"Apertus: a fully open, transparent, multilingual language model
EPFL, ETH Zurich and the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) released Apertus 2 September, Switzerland’s first large-scale, open, multilingual language model — a milestone in generative AI for transparency and diversity.
Researchers from EPFL, ETH Zurich and CSCS have developed the large language model Apertus – it is one of the largest open LLMs and a basic technology on which others can build.
In brief Researchers at EPFL, ETH Zurich and CSCS have developed Apertus, a fully open Large Language Model (LLM) – one of the largest of its kind. As a foundational technology, Apertus enables innovation and strengthens AI expertise across research, society and industry by allowing others to build upon it. Apertus is currently available through strategic partner Swisscom, the AI platform Hugging Face, and the Public AI network. …
The model is named Apertus – Latin for “open” – highlighting its distinctive feature: the entire development process, including its architecture, model weights, and training data and recipes, is openly accessible and fully documented.
AI researchers, professionals, and experienced enthusiasts can either access the model through the strategic partner Swisscom or download it from Hugging Face – a platform for AI models and applications – and deploy it for their own projects. Apertus is freely available in two sizes – featuring 8 billion and 70 billion parameters, the smaller model being more appropriate for individual usage. Both models are released under a permissive open-source license, allowing use in education and research as well as broad societal and commercial applications. …
Trained on 15 trillion tokens across more than 1,000 languages – 40% of the data is non-English – Apertus includes many languages that have so far been underrepresented in LLMs, such as Swiss German, Romansh, and many others. …
Furthermore, for people outside of Switzerland, the external pagePublic AI Inference Utility will make Apertus accessible as part of a global movement for public AI. “Currently, Apertus is the leading public AI model: a model built by public institutions, for the public interest. It is our best proof yet that AI can be a form of public infrastructure like highways, water, or electricity,” says Joshua Tan, Lead Maintainer of the Public AI Inference Utility."
Available doesn’t mean licensed for AI training.
“Your honor, my archive of Linux ISOs were acquired under the pretense that they were ‘publicly available’ and the copyright holders didn’t ‘opt-out’ using the ‘up-for-grabs.txt’ standard I invented.”
and yet it is still a legally unsettled question whether LLM training requires a copyright license at all; and it is my opinion that no one should want that to be the case, why would people on the Internet want to argue for an expansion of copyright law?
Saying an expensive product that requires servers to run is the only thing exempt from copyright is just handing a bunch of giant corporations a get out of jail free card.
Either reform copyright so more things are public domain or require AI companies to pursue licenses to training data.
Giving an unfair exemption to copyright laws solely to giant tech companies is just another corporate handout.
What I want is consistency, either apply the law equally and fairly or reform the whole system. Nobody, especially not big business, should be getting special carve-outs to be exempt from copyright infringement outside of ‘fair use’ considerations.
In my ideal world, IP law would be framed to protect novel ideas just long enough for inventors or creators to capitalize on their ideas and prevent outright 1:1 copying without any sort of innovative or transformational changes. It would also discourage squatting on things like patents- patent squatting and the like should lead to losing rights.
“I didn’t steal and distribute your work, I just made a machine distill it down and able to copy everything meaningful about it!”
Why would it be an expansion? If you’re using someone else’s work, why wouldn’t you need a license? If I write a book and publish it under CC-BY-NC, should Google be allowed to take my work for their commercial product without compensation or even attribution? Should Microsoft be allowed to create closed-source commercial Copilot off GPL source code?
BSD license allows for this and still thrives (PS5 OS, Apple iOS and MacOS [Darwin], TrueNAS, OPNsense, and several enterprise-level commercial router operating systems use it and contribute significant code back into BSD project to ensure CVE safety). I’m not agreeing with it, just providing an alternate perspective.
It’s an expansion to say that LLM training constitutes a derivative work. You are of course entitled to your opinion that it should be the case; all I can say to that is that in the 2000s and 2010s nearly everyone on the Internet tended to argue for more limitations, not further expansions, of copyright law, and I wonder what happened to that attitude.
Well, this being the open source community, I would expect most people here to be on the side of respecting the rights of content creators. Like I said, if I write some GPL software, I don’t think Microsoft should be able to disrespect my license just because they’re also disrespecting everyone else’s license too through automation at scale.
Legally, it seems it does, at least in the US and EU. I assume China too.
Whether or not it should is a different argument, but copyright is a legal framework, not an ethical one.