Great to see that #Apertus has been highlighted as a digitally independent alternative to ChatGPT yesterday! However, this needs a quick fact-check:
- The model was trained in a local data center at CSCS, the costs of the project are almost entirely covered by Swiss public institutions;
- People from all over the world have made contributions - open source LLM development is a global community of interest;
- There are groups in several countries using or fine-tuning Apertus to improve linguistic capabilities and local knowledge;
- While Apertus can run on Amazon servers, thanks to a third-party deployment script, it runs anywhere LLMs can run;
- Quantized versions are available to fit even relatively cheap consumer grade video cards (see my blog posts for details);
- The #PublicAI web interface and Apertus 8B demo runs on AWS, however the large model is hosted by CSCS as well;
- You do not need to use Google to authenticate to Public AI, it is just a convenient way to log into #OpenWebUI - if you want another provider, please suggest it;
- Apertus is not a chatbot on its own, it is a large language model that can be deployed as part of a system to provide chat services.
I'll send this to the maintainers as well. Did I miss anything?
https://di.day/en/digital-switch-recipes/alternativen-zu-chatgpt-co#different-ways-to-cook







