Available now! Apertus 1.5 — 8B & 70B models with multimodal text/image/audio input, a 4x longer context window, optional thinking mode, and improved tool use, all built transparently and responsibly. 3.2M+ downloads 🚀 #Apertus #OpenSourceLLM Details+Links+Open roles: apertus-ai.org/articles/202...

Apertus 1.5 is out! 🚀 ✅ Multimodal capabilities ✅ Stronger reasoning ✅ A roadmap of regular releases Read more: apertus-ai.org/news Models: huggingface.co/swiss-ai @cscsch.bsky.social @eth-ai-center.bsky.social @icepfl.bsky.social @mjaggi.bsky.social @abosselut.bsky.social

#Apertus is mentioned —the open large language model developed by ETH Zürich, EPFL and CSCS—which demonstrates how excellent research, cutting-edge infrastructures and international collaboration can contribute to strategically important technologies ⬇️

SBFI SEFRI SERI@sbfi.admin.ch · 2w ago

On 21.07.26, State Secretary Martina Hirayama represented CH at the Informal EU Ministerial Meeting on Competitiveness in Research & Innovation under the Irish Presidency in Dublin. CH highlighted the importance of openness, excellence and cross-border cooperation for Europe's innovation.⬇️

UNICC and EPFL's Machine Learning and Optimization Laboratory led by @mjaggi.bsky.social have published a white paper presenting a practical framework for evaluating the safety and reliability of LLMs in institutional settings. 👉 Learn more: ai.epfl.ch/epfl-lab-and...

Searching for something new to read? All ICML 2026 papers are now public: openreview.net/group?id=ICM... (including all 6551 accepted papers and also rejects which opt-in)

Apertus Mini is now running entirely in your browser 🇨🇭 80+ tps for the 1.5B, 60+ tps for the 4B (on my M3). Fully client-side via Transformers.js + ONNX + WebGPU.

Three new model weights: 0.5B, 1.5B, 4B are available using new quantization and distillation techniques. Download #Apertus 1.1, read the ICML workshop report, try a new demo on @hf.co - all just a tap away in our latest blog post: apertus-ai.org/articles/202...

Announcing the #ICML2026 invited speakers! Pascale Fung Susan Athey (@susanathey.bsky.social) Sham Kakade (@shamkakade.bsky.social ) Aviv Regev Verena Rieser (@verenarieser.bsky.social) Arvind Narayanan (@randomwalker.bsky.social) Check out the blog post for more info! blog.icml.cc/2026/05/18/a...

Ahem, back to business... Decision notifications are being released on OpenReview. There were 23,918 submissions that entered review, roughly double last year. 6,352 papers were accepted, for an acceptance rate of 26.6%. 536 papers (2.2% of submissions) are "spotlights." 1/3

Muon: I made a new 3-slides explanation of this amazing optimizer for today's lecture. Let me know what you think

Every system that was regulated, either explicitly or implicitly, by the fact that they were effortful for humans (letters of recommendation, government filings, essays, or, as this paper finds, lawsuits) will break under a wave of AI.

To ensure compliance w peer-review policies, ICML has removed 795 reviews (1% of total) by reviewers who used LLMs when they explicitly agreed to not. Consequently, 497 papers (2% of all submissions) of these (reciprocal) reviewers have been desk rejected Details in blog post 👇

www.swissinfo.ch/eng/digital-...

Is Swiss AI a powerhouse for democracy?

US cyber expert Bruce Schneier has high hopes for a Swiss AI model. Optimism is also growing in Switzerland, but not across the board.

swissinfo.ch

There has been some online discussion of prompt watermarks in ICML submissions. tl;dr: - Yes, this is one of the *conference*'s (several) scientific integrity measures - Yes, it's not infalliable (but it still helps) - No, your paper won't be desk rejected as a result 1/4

More like every week.

Open models continue to pace closed models on a 9 month lag.

Epoch AI@epochai.bsky.social · 6mo ago

Kimi K2.5 set a new record among open-weight models on the Epoch Capabilities Index (ECI), which combines multiple benchmarks onto a single scale. Its score of 147 is about on par with o3, Grok 4, and Sonnet 4.5. It still lags the overall frontier.

A factor of 10 billion since 2010 😮 A couple of eye-opening slides form @sloeschcke.bsky.social's presentation at today’s @belongielab.org meeting (1/2)

The #ICML2026 abstract deadline has passed! We're at 33540 active abstracts (and dropping). How many will make it over the finish line? 🏁

New blog post (on a shiny new ICML blog!): What's New in #ICML2026 Peer Review Some highlights: - Policies to combat thinly sliced contributions - Cascading desk rejections for peer-review abuse - Reviewer reciprocity - New ways to support authors and reviewers Post: blog.icml.cc/2026/01/08/w...

A multidisciplinary team of ETH Zurich researchers developed a method of using an autonomous excavator to construct a dry-​stone wall that is six metres high and sixty-​five metres long.

Autonomous excavator constructs a six-metre-high dry-stone wall

ethz.ch

We updated the plots we use to measure the open model ecosystem at interconnects, to guide The ATOM Project, and to understand what's happening. We have ~8 plots to summarize what's happening. First, the high level picture showing China's growing adoption lead.

Announcing the ICML 2026 policy for LLMs in reviewing! Reviewers and authors both pick either conservative or permissive LLM use, and will be matched accordingly. Importantly: authors on papers who choose conservative must obey the conservative policy as reviewers.

👀 I am working on something pretty cool.. Hopefully, it will soon be possible to try #Apertus 🇨🇭 directly in your browser, powered by Transformers.js 🎉

The threshold for consistent English/query understanding is now 3M parameters.

Breaking: we release a fully synthetic generalist dataset for pretraining, SYNTH and two new SOTA reasoning models exclusively trained on it. Despite having seen only 200 billion tokens, Baguettotron is currently best-in-class in its size range. pleias.fr/blog/blogsyn...

🎉 ICML 2026 Call for Papers (& Position Papers) is here! 🎉 📅 Key Dates Abstract deadline: Jan 23, 2026 AOE Paper deadline: Jan 28, 2026 AOE A few key changes this year: - Attendance for authors of accepted papers is optional - Originally submitted version of accepted papers will be made public ...

so open-weights models are much happier than closed ones i guess, cause they live on in the long run, did i get that right?

mr. TIM@timkellogg.me · 9mo ago

Anthropic Model Depreciation Process Anthropic sweetly asked Sonnet about its preferences in how it wanted to be deprecated in addition: - no, still not open weights - preserve weights and keeping it running internally - letting models pursue their interests www.anthropic.com/research/dep...

91% of reasoning does not need RL 🤯 arxiv.org/abs/2510.07364

Base Models Know How to Reason, Thinking Models Learn When

Why do thinking language models like DeepSeek R1 outperform their base counterparts? Despite consistent performance gains, it remains unclear to what extent thinking models learn entirely new reasonin...

arxiv.org

I just tried the official demo for the new Gemini 2.5 Computer Use model and it started by navigating to Google, solving Google's own CAPTCHA and then running a search! https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/7/gemini-25-computer-use-captchas/

Gemini 2.5 Computer Use can solve Google’s own CAPTCHAs

Google just introduced a new Gemini 2.5 Computer Use model, specially designed to help operate a GUI interface by interacting with visible elements using a virtual mouse and keyboard. I …

simonwillison.net

We're hiring again for AI research engineering roles: Join the team behind the Apertus LLM, if you share our passion to work on impactful AI that's truly open. careers.epfl.ch/job/Lausanne...