Technology

Apertus-8B

Apertus-8B is a fully open, highly transparent 8-billion parameter language model trained on 15 trillion tokens to deliver high-performance multilingual text generation across more than 1000 languages.

Developed by the Swiss AI Initiative (a collaboration between EPFL, ETH Zurich, and CSCS), Apertus-8B represents a major shift toward complete transparency in generative AI. The model is trained from scratch on 15 trillion tokens using a staged curriculum of web, code, and math data, with roughly 40% of its training set dedicated to non-English content to support over 1000 languages natively. By releasing not just the weights but also the exact training data reconstruction scripts, code, and alignment recipes, Apertus-8B provides developers with a fully compliant, GDPR-friendly, and reproducible foundation optimized for efficient local deployment (running comfortably on a single 40 GB GPU).