I hadn’t realized they updated this model last month! You can use it here.
Apertus 1.5 70B is Switzerland’s latest fully open multilingual large language model developed by the Swiss AI Initiative. It is designed to advance transparent, compliant, and high-performance AI while remaining fully open throughout the entire training pipeline.
- Swiss AI Initiative : Developed by the Swiss AI Initiative to provide a fully open, transparent, and compliant foundation model.
- Fully Open : Open model weights, open training data, complete training recipes, and publicly documented training methodology.
- Massively Multilingual – Native support for 1,811 languages, enabling broad multilingual understanding and generation.
- Compliance First – Trained using fully compliant datasets while respecting retrospective opt-out requests and reducing memorization through the Goldfish loss methodology.
- Long Context – Supports context windows of up to 262,144 tokens, enabling large document analysis and extended conversations.
- Tool Calling Support – Supports agentic workflows and tool use when deployed with compatible inference frameworks such as recent versions of vLLM.
- Open Deployment Ecosystem – Compatible with Transformers, vLLM, SGLang, MLX and GGUF deployment formats.
I don’t understand the reporting on data centers turning tapwater brown; it doesn’t make logical sense to me. reporting I can see with these keywords is pretty bad (as in, uncurious about the mechanism). My best guess is that, in the game of telephone, someone has confused a data center turning on with a data center being constructed. And in construction, it’s easy to imagine breaking a pipe (by weight or force or mismanaged pressure) and causing this sort of thing. Please let me know if you’ve got better sources; I’m having a bad time of it. The other mechanism I could imagine is drawing down an aquifer, so that what used to be a clean well becomes filthy. But then again it’s probably not waste from the datacenter you’d see?
My understanding is that data center cooling water can pick up trace metals and dust. But you don’t need pure water for lake cooling, and it’s not particularly expensive to do heavy-metal filtering on the waste (should it be much different from the lake bed) afaik?
Now that is a very good point. I’m willing to bet this is the case, because when you mention it, I don’t think I ever heard anyone mention a real, actual cause for the water turning brown, just that it did. And I don’t think I’ve heard mention how long after construction has finished that the water stayed brown.
That’s not to say that it isn’t a disaster that the water turned brown to begin with. There should definitely be some rules and regulations in place where there is sufficient measures taken to ensure people can have proper water for consumption and for hygiene, that they used to have before they started construction. This should not be the problem of the residents.
But yeah, now that you mention it, I also find it odd that just cooling in and of itself would cause the water to be so contaminated. It shouldn’t acquire any extra sludge or anything more than perhaps some minerals from piping, or something.
Agreed on right to clean water, though I’m also pretty confident that this is in ~every state legal code. Certainly a breach of contract for the water company. Sadly accidents (and rushed, poor quality work) do happen, and regulators do fail to act on things, and it’s hard to identify+fix a broken pipe. Regulatory failure is presumably happening much more these days, due to the deep cuts. see, for example, this headline (which I have not checked carefully).
I don’t know what’s more infuriating, a) there are no rules and they can treat the nearby residents however they want, or b) they are breaking rules that are in place but reaping no consequences.
Either way I’m infuriated. 😆😭