has turned out to be a modern art performance!” he complains. The attack brought reactions from internet users, including Maxime Derian, a French artificial intelligence expert. “American and Chinese opensource models had a head start. So what? The first models from those countries were also far from perfect. Your Swiss model is local. The next versions will be better and it will be useful within two to three years,” the expert predicts. The fact that Apertus makes mistakes is because the model has not yet been sufficiently trained and does not have enough data. Antoine Bosselut shares this view: “We have done the lion’s share of the work, which involved building and training the model. The model is now available free of charge to future users,” the EPFL professor says in the model’s defence. betan. Some bright sparks have created a system called “Mut zur Lücke” (daring to have gaps). It tells students which parts of their lessons they can ignore without the risk of failing. Zurich City Council also uses Apertus. “I am ZüriCityGPT and I know (almost) everything that’s published on the city’s website,” the site announces. With certain limits. How many armed police does the city have? Apertus is “unfortunately unable to help you”, the robot replies. GPT is a little savvier. “Around 1,700 agents are authorised to carry a service weapon, but there are no public sources indicating how many actually carry a weapon on a permanent basis,” it says. Surprisingly, Apertus is provided without an interface that would let its users write prompts. This was not the objective: the LLM is there to act as source material, according to its creators. However, anyone can try out Apertus via https://publicai.co, a platform developed by an American non-profit organisation. Mistakes and criticism In Switzerland, the first feedback on Apertus centred on some glaring errors. “I am learning that Chillon Castle was originally a small, fortified village built on a limestone rock in the middle of the lake,” François Pilet, a journalist from French-speaking Switzerland and one of the founders of the investigation website Gottham City, wrote mockingly on LinkedIn. He is astonished at the price of the program. “At a time when the Swiss federal institutes of technology are tripling fees for foreign students, they had no qualms about spending ten million Swiss francs to finance what Like all AI language models, Apertus had to be trained. The Swiss supercomputer ALPS in Lugano was used for this purpose. Photo: Keystone Swiss Review / December 2025 / No.5 13
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