ETH and EPFL present their own AI model

Samuel Buchmann

11-7-2025

Translation: machine translated

A new open source language model from Switzerland supports over 1000 languages and offers 70 billion parameters. This makes it similar in size to Meta's Llama 3 and is intended to offer an alternative to proprietary LLMs.

ETH Zurich and EPFL have developed a fully open Large Language Model (LLM). It is due to be released in late summer 2025. According to the media release, the model supports over 1000 languages. It was trained on the supercomputer «Alps» at the Swiss Supercomputer Centre CSCS.

In contrast to proprietary LLMs, such as those from OpenAI or Anthropic, the Swiss model is based on transparency. Source code, model weights and training data are all made available. This is rare in the industry. Although LLMs from Meta and DeepSeek are «Open Weight», they are not fully «Open Source». This means that the algorithms and training data remain under lock and key.

The ETH model will be released in two versions - with eight and 70 billion parameters. The latter is comparable to Meta's Llama 3, while OpenAI's GPT-4 is estimated to have around 1,800 billion parameters and Anthropic's Claude 4 Opus around 300 billion. The number of parameters is not the only metric for the performance of an LLM, but it is an indication. Proprietary models currently achieve the highest scores in benchmarks. However, open source models offer advantages in terms of traceability, customisability and data control.

Data protection taken into account during training

Swiss data protection laws, Swiss copyright law and the transparency obligations under the EU AI Act are taken into account when developing the LLM. According to a recent study by the project managers, there is practically no loss of performance for everyday tasks if the opt-outs for web crawling are respected during data collection - and the training thus ignores certain web content.

The model is published under the Apache 2.0 licence. This should make it accessible for both scientific and industrial applications. It is a result of the Swiss AI Initiative, which was launched by EPFL and ETH Zurich in December 2023. With over 800 researchers involved and access to over 20 million GPU hours per year on the supercomputer at CSCS, it is the world's largest open science and open source project on AI base models.

Samuel Buchmann

Senior Editor

Samuel.Buchmann@digitecgalaxus.ch

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