The ETH AI Center
ETH Zurich founded the ETH AI Center in 2020. It brings together AI researchers from all of the university’s departments to work on the foundations of AI, its applications and its effects on society. Its stated aim is trustworthy, inclusive and accessible AI for the benefit of society.
Apertus: an open language model
On 2 September 2025 EPFL, ETH Zurich and the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) released Apertus, a large language model in two sizes, with 8 billion and 70 billion parameters. It was trained on 15 trillion tokens of text in more than 1,000 languages, about 40 per cent of it not in English.
What sets Apertus apart is openness: the developers published the model weights with intermediate checkpoints, the training code, the documentation and the training data. Using these published materials, the process of building the model can be traced and audited. How it was trained is on The machines behind the models.
Sources
- ETH AI Center, About us
- ETH Zurich, Apertus: a fully open, transparent, multilingual language model (press release)
Sources checked on: 1 November 2026