Europe is getting busy with Open Source LLMs

So it looks like ETH Zurich, EPFL and CSC will be deploying a fully open-source large language model (LLM). It was trained on Switzerland’s “Alps” supercomputer and is set to debut in late summer 2025.

Why this matters

• Full transparency & accessibility — all model architecture, weights and training data are released under an open licence, enabling global scrutiny and collaboration across academia, government and industry.
• Truly multilingual — designed with global inclusion in mind, the model supports fluency in over 1,000 languages, trained on diverse datasets (approximately 60% English, 40% non-English).
• Scalable for diverse needs — offering both 8B and 70B parameter versions, it balances performance with accessibility; 70B places it among the top-tier open models globally.
• Powered by sovereign infrastructure — NVIDIA and HPE’s support via CSCS’s Alps highlights the power of public–private collaboration in securing infrastructure independence and innovation.

Trustworthy and democratised AI

This marks a pivotal step toward trustworthy and democratised AI — we know what it was trained on and we can poke into its internals. Most of all it proves there are multiple ways to approach technology development.

Here at Full Stack Energy we look forward to applying it to some domain-specific problems. The open nature of this LLM will be of critical interest to our customers in this space — precisely because, as we’ve argued, opaque black-box models are hard to trust where decisions carry real consequences. An open model you can inspect, fine-tune and run on your own infrastructure is a different proposition entirely.

Where Full Stack Energy fits

Open, inspectable models are a natural fit for the kind of domain-specific, trustworthy AI we build for energy customers — from conversational access to data to operational analytics. If you want AI you can actually understand and control, let’s talk.