What are EPFL and Eth Zurich’s open source LLM
Eth Zurich and EPFL’s open LLM provide a transparent alternative to Black-Box AI, built on Green Compute and available for public release.
Large Language Model (LLMS)a neural network that predicts the next word in a sentence, is providing power to today’s motivation Generated AI. Most people are still closed and available to the public, but cannot access the checks or improvements. This lack of transparency conflicts with Web3’s principles of openness and permissionless innovation.
So when Eth Zurich in Lausanne (EPFL) and Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Eth Eth and Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, everyone noticed Announce A fully public model, trained in Switzerland’s carbon-neutral “Alps” supercomputer and is scheduled to be released under Apache 2.0 later this year.
It is often referred to as “the open llm of Switzerland”, “the language model built for the public interest” or “the Swiss language model”, but so far, no specific brand or project name has been shared in public statements.
Unlike the API-only “Black -Box” system, Open llm is a model that can be downloaded, reviewed and fine-tuned locally.
Anatomy of Swiss Public LLM
- scale: The two configurations are 8 billion and 70 billion parameters, and 15 trillion tokens were trained.
- language: Through 60/40 English-non-English dataset, coverage in 1,500 languages.
- Infrastructure: 10,000 nvidia grace The “Alps” on the chip are powered entirely by renewable energy.
- license: Open code and weights to provide forks and modification rights to researchers and startups.
What makes Swiss LLM stand out
Swiss LLM combines openness, multilingual scale and green infrastructure to provide fundamentally transparent LLM.
- Open design architecture: Unlike GPT-4, which provides API access only, this Swiss LLM will provide all its neural network parameters (weights), training code and dataset references Apache 2.0 Licenseallowing developers to fine-tune, audit and deploy developers without limit.
- Dual model size: It will be released in 8 billion and 70 billion parameter versions. The program spans lightweight, large-scale usage and remains consistently open, with GPT4 estimated at 1.7 trillion parameters not being publicly available.
- A large number of multilingual ranges: Having received 15 trillion token training in over 1,500 languages (approximately 60% English, 40% non-English), it challenges the English-centric advantages of GPT-4 with true global inclusion.
- Green, sovereign calculation: Built at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSC), the carbon-neutral Alps cluster, with 10,000 Nvidia Grace-hopper super chips offering over 40 Exaflops in FP8 mode, it combines scales with a lack of sustainability in private cloud training.
- Transparent data practice: The model complies with Swiss data protection, copyright norms and EU AI ACT transparency, respects Crawler Opt -Ots -Ots -Ots -Ots -Ots -Ots -Ots without sacrificing performance, emphasizing new ethical standards.
What fully opens AI model for Web3 unlock
Complete model transparency enables OnChain inference, tokenized data streams and Oracle-Safe Defi integration without black boxes.
- OnChain infers: Running the trimmed version of the Swiss model internal reel sequencer can implement real-time smart contract summary and fraud proof.
- Tag data market: Because the training corpus is transparent, the data contributor can be Obtain a token and was reviewed for prejudice.
- Synthesis with Defi Tooling: Open weights allow deterministic output Carapace When the LLMS feed price model or liquidation robot, it can be verified and reduce the risk of manipulation.
These design goals can be mapped cleanly into tall SEO phrases, including Dispersed AIBlockchain AI integration and OnChain reasoning improves article discoverability without keyword filling.
did you know? Open LLM can be performed within a summary to help smart contracts summarize legal documents or mark suspicious transactions in real time.
The AI market headwinds you can’t ignore
- The AI market is projection More than $500 billion, more than 80% are controlled by shutdown providers.
- Blockchain-AI is expected Grow From $550 million in 2024 to $4.33 billion (CAGR) in 2034.
- 68% of businesses have driven AI agents, 59% Quote Take flexibility and governance as the highest selection criteria, and vote on trust in open weights.
Regulation: EU AI Act complies with sovereignty model
Like the upcoming model in Switzerland, public LLM aims to comply with the EU AI Act and has obvious advantages in transparency and regulatory consistency.
July 18, 2025, European Commission release Guide to basic model of whole-body risk. Requirements include adversarial testing, detailed summary of training data and cybersecurity audits, all of which are effective August 2, 2025. Open projects that publish their weights and datasets can meet many of these transparency requirements out of the box, thus making the public model compliant.
Swiss LLM vs GPT -4
GPT-4 still has the advantage of original performance due to scale and proprietary improvements. But the Swiss model narrows the gap, especially Multilingual Tasks and non-commercial research, while providing auditability that fundamentally fails to achieve proprietary models.
did you know? Starting from 2 August 2025, the basic models in the EU must publish data summary, audit logs and adversarial test results, and the upcoming Swiss open source LLM has met the requirements.
Alibaba Qwen vs Swiss Public LLM: Cross-Model Comparison
Although Qwen emphasizes model diversity and deployment performance, public LLMs in Switzerland focus on full-stack transparency and multilingual depth.
Swiss public LLM is not the only serious contender in the open LLM competition. Alibaba’s QWEN series Qwen3 and Qwen3-Coder quickly became high-performance, fully open source alternatives.
Although Swiss public LLMs shine with full stack transparency, thus fully releasing their weights, training codes and dataset methods, Qwen’s openness focuses on weights and code, with less clarity on training data sources.
When it comes to model diversity, Qwen offers a wide range of models, including intensive models and refined ones A mixture of Experts (MOE) architectures With up to 235 billion parameters (22 billion activities), as well as hybrid inference modes for more context-aware processing. By contrast, Swiss public LLM maintains a more academic focus, offering two clean, research-oriented sizes: 8 billion and 70 billion.
Regarding performance, Alibaba’s Qwen3 encoder has been independently from the competitive GPT-4 by resources such as Reuters, Elets CIO and Wikipedia, with coding and math-intensive tasks as its competitors. Performance data for Swiss Public LLM are still being released publicly.
Regarding multilingual capabilities, Switzerland’s public LLM leads over 1,500 languages, and Qwen’s coverage range includes 119, is still important but more selective. Finally, the infrastructure footprint reflects different philosophies: Swiss public LLM in carbon neutrality in CSCS Alpine supercomputerIt’s a sovereign, green facility, and the QWEN model is trained and provided through Alibaba Cloud, prioritizing speed and scale over energy transparency.
Here is a side-by-side view of how two open source LLM plans measure across key dimensions:
did you know? The MOE used by QWEN3 -CODER is set to 235B total parameters, but only 22 billion activities can be used at one time, optimizing speed without full calculation costs.
Why should builders care
- Complete control: Have model stack, weights, code and data source. There are no vendor locks or API restrictions.
- Customizable: Customized models Fine adjustment To domain-specific tasks, OnChain analysis, Defi Oracle verification, code generation
- Cost Optimization: Deploy on the GPU market or summary node; quantization into 4 bits can reduce inference costs by 60%-80%.
- Design Compliance: Transparent documents and I’m doing Requirements, fewer legal obstacles and deployment time.
Traps to navigate when working with open source LLM
Open source LLMS has transparency, but faces obstacles such as instability, high computing requirements and legal uncertainty.
The main challenges facing open source LLM include:
- Performance and Scale Gap: Despite the considerable architecture, the community consensus questioned whether open source models could match the reasoning, fluent and tool integration capabilities of closed models such as GPT-4 or Claude4.
- Implementation and component instability: The LLM ecosystem often faces software fragmentation, such as version mismatch, missing modules, or crashes, common at runtime.
- Integration complexity: When deploying open source LLM, users often encounter dependency conflicts, complex environment settings or configuration errors.
- Resource intensity: Model training, hosting, and inference require a lot of compute and memory (e.g., Multi-GPU, 64 GB RAM), making it easy for smaller teams to use.
- Documentation defects: The transition from research to deployment is often hindered by incomplete, outdated or inaccurate documentation, complicating adoption.
- Security and trust risks: Open ecosystems may be vulnerable to supply chain threats (e.g. Typing by hallucination packaging name). Relaxed governance can lead to vulnerabilities such as backdoors, improper permissions, or data breaches.
- Legal and intellectual property ambiguity: Unlike a fully audited closed model, using data crawled online or mixed licenses may expose users to intellectual-specific conflicts or violations of the Terms of Use.
- Hallucination and reliability issues: Open models can produce reasonable but incorrect output, especially when fine-tuning without strict supervision. For example, developer reports Hallucination packaging reference In 20% of the code snippets.
- Delay and Extension Challenges: Under load, on-premises deployments can suffer from slow response time, timeout or instability, and problems are rarely seen in managed API services.