EPFL, ETH Zurich and the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) released Apertus today, Switzerland’s first large-scale, open, multilingual language model — a milestone in generative AI for transparency and diversity.
Nice. This is the one that supposedly comes with open data sets, training data and everything, and it’s a true “open-source” model. Seems it’s avalable in 7B and 70B.
Yup, I see pretrain data on their GitHub, cool to see it released
You can try it out here: https://publicai.co/
For the questions that I asked it, it was pretty useless. Those are not representative and you should definitely try it yourself. This model probably has it’s strengths in other aspects. It’s just two random things that have been on my mind and I wanted a quick response to so that I can then do a deeper dive myself.
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Technical question looking for software that can provide a certain functionality had multiple false results and didn’t mention the most common solution (which you can find in the top google result, a reddit thread from 2022 about the topic). Other AIs all responded with info which matched that reddit thread.
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Question about biomechanics of plants and why the use of human feces as fertilizer is bad (which was done historically and still done in some places in the world. My family abroad still does it because of tradition and I want to explain to them why they should stop). It didn’t want to answer because the question “is inappropriate”. After being trivially convinced that the question is in fact not inappropriate, it kept saying “it’s bad, not recommended, don’t do that. Instead do this.” but it could never explain WHY it is bad. Further followups just resulted in an error. Other AIs immediately gave a list of stuff that is in human feces and how it contaminates the soil and which ones can be absorbed into the plant and cause harm for consumers. (Which I then used to find relevant articles on health and studies that measure plant absorbtion of those things)
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