Zurich/Lausanne – The Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology in Zurich and Lausanne are launching the Swiss AI Initiative. It does not want to leave the global pioneering role in artificial intelligence to tech companies and should give Switzerland digital sovereignty with the help of the new Alps supercomputer.
The Swiss AI initiative of the two Federal Institutes of Technology in Zurich(ETH) and Lausanne(EPFL) aims to position Switzerland as a leading global location for transparent and trustworthy artificial intelligence (AI). The new Alps supercomputer provides the necessary infrastructure for this. In spring 2024, it will commence operations at ETH's national high-performance computing center CSCS in Lugano.
According to a press release from ETH, access to this computer will enable Switzerland to keep pace with the world's largest tech companies in terms of computing power. "The pioneering role in such a forward-looking field must be assumed by science and not left to a few multinational technology companies," says ETH Vice President for Research, Christian Wolfrum. "This is the only way we can safeguard Switzerland's freedom of research and digital sovereignty."
Alps' computing capacities will be used to develop new, industry-specific open source base models based on transparent large language models for generative AI. These can then be used in robotics, medical diagnostics or climate science, for example, and "passed on as openly and directly as possible to society and industry". SMEs, start-ups and the public sector should benefit directly from this.
The initiative aims to pool the expertise of around a dozen Swiss universities, universities of applied sciences and research institutes. According to the information provided, 75 professors have already been recruited. ce/mm