Found from Bruce Shneier’s blog. This model is free, ad-free, privacy respecting, and likely to stay that way. If you or folks you know are heavily using GPT, and likely to be hurt when it starts introducing ads (and otherwise enshittifying) soon, do make sure they know there are alternatives like this. This particular chat model uses a system prompt chosen by the swiss government, with the intention of providing LLM access as a public utility (like a library). I believe models are intentionally trained on ethical datasets (see the details of Aptertus here), with an effort towards sustainable energy use.

This is the definition of ethically sourced data from the Apertus website: […] the training corpus builds only on data which is publicly available. So they still train on Websites, Blogs and Social Media. Ethical my ass.

That is at least an improvement over including in its corpus the entire worldwide collection of copyrighted materials.

But that stuff is copywritten as well most of the time. Just because it’s free to look at doesn’t mean it’s free to download, modify or feed into an AI.