EPFL

A university contribution to open model development

EPFL traces its roots to the École Spéciale de Lausanne, founded in 1853, and adopted its federal polytechnic name in 1969. Its role in Apertus is that of a model co-developer, rather than merely the affiliation of a scientist quoted in a launch announcement. [1][2]

Joint development and public research resources

The September 2025 Apertus release joined ETH Zurich, EPFL and CSCS in developing language models trained on the Alps supercomputer. The release made 8B and 70B model weights available with code and training documentation, giving researchers material to inspect and adapt outside a hosted chat service. [2]

The 8B instruction-tuned model card identifies its weights as Apache 2.0. That model license does not establish a uniform license for every item in the underlying training corpus. The release is evidence of a public model artifact, while its authors' capability claims remain their own evaluations. [3][2]

In July 2026, the partners announced Apertus 1.5, adding image and audio understanding to the project’s text-model work. CSCS also introduced an inference service for its users and the Swiss academic community. This institutional access route is distinct from making model files downloadable. [4]