Apertus – Open Foundation Model for Sovereign AI
305 points
by T-A
8 hours ago
| 26 comments
| apertvs.ai
| HN
maxloh
7 hours ago
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Other fully open LLMs include Allen AI's OLMo 3.1 and MBZUAI's K2 Think V2, both of which have released their full training pipelines and datasets.

Nvidia Nemotron is also an open training source model, though a portion of its dataset remains proprietary.

Quoting lambda's comment:

> Note that the Nemotron models are generally stronger than Olmo and K2 Think V2 (according to Artificial Analysis benchmarks), and there is a lot of overlap in their datasets (lots of datasets are based on the same sources with different filtering, Olmo and K2 Think V2 both have used some Nemotron datasets).

> But yeah, Nemotron is a modern and fairly capable LLM, even the 122b is more capable than Deepseek R1 (a 671b model) on most benchmarks, and there's also the recently released 550b Ultra now.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48492439

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soundworlds
4 hours ago
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Allen AI do not get enough love. They are doing GenAI how it should have always been done.

In fact, if the frontier companies had taken their approach, it would have started much slower, but I think we would be far more advanced by 2035. Instead we have a majority of society that wants to see AI fail.

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dvt
1 hour ago
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> Instead we have a majority of society that wants to see AI fail.

Do you talk to regular people? I work out of coffee shops routinely and literally like 90% of laptops have ChatGPT or Claude open. I was shocked at how many of my friends love the silliest of AI features (like Slack bot summarizing your day or your upcoming meetings), and a lot of decks, proposals, SOW's, etc. are (at least in part) generated with AI these days.

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jstummbillig
21 minutes ago
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A quarter of US citizens use a Chatbot daily.

https://www.pewresearch.org/chart/about-a-quarter-of-u-s-adu...

It all, of course, depends on what people mean by "AI" (I think the question basically defeats itself, it's akin to asking someone about "databases", given that it covers image generation, self driving cars, TikTok feeds, drug discovery and chatbots) but AI sentiment at large is more negative than positive.

https://www.pewresearch.org/chart/americans-predict-ais-impa...

So, depending on where you sit: Sure, most people will use "AI", meaning a chatbot (probably ChatGPT: https://www.pewresearch.org/chart/americans-report-using-cha...). 90% in coffee shop land, why not.

But that does not mean that they are not weary of the consequences, and are growing more weary. I think, predictably, the better situated you are and the more your direct livelihood is at stake. That's just the animal we are.

Does that mean that we should have slowed down? Matter of opinion. My take: Absolutely not. The people who need it the most around the world will have dramatically improved lives, because of access to better medical advice or information about institutions and systems, to start things and help them in their daily lives.

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sawjet
2 hours ago
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Is there any evidence that "a majority of society wants AI to fail"

Or is it just vibes?

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markerz
1 hour ago
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There’s a few polls that have shown most people use AI, but they also dislike it. I’m in that boat, where my company pays for my subscription, and I use it to be productive. But I don’t really feel good about it.

https://gizmodo.com/people-hate-ai-even-more-than-they-hate-...

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hit8run
3 hours ago
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Care to elaborate on this?
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AndrewKemendo
4 hours ago
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Fully agree with this and they were leading robotic learning as well even back to 2019.

IsaacSim was (and might still be) the best robotic learning sim and I ran MLAgents.

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vcryan
5 hours ago
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Maybe I'll give Nemotron another try. Yesterday I used the latest one on OpenRouter and it was bad - worse than StepFun
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SwellJoe
7 hours ago
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I like the idea, and it has become more pressing that everyone outside the US think about tech sovereignty because the US has become an unsafe place to keep your data, but the impression I get from Apertus is that it moves at the speed of a committee. I have no expectation they'll deliver a competitive model. At least, not competitive with current models. Maybe competitive with models a year ago (though they haven't even done that yet, right?).
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nezuzen
7 hours ago
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"the US has become an unsafe place to keep your data"

I empathize with this but curious what would make any other country a better safehaven for your data? I personally like the EU's approach to data safeguards, but are there other locales/data protections you have in mind that would keep your data "safe".

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OkWing99
2 hours ago
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I think US is the only country that's asked to limit their frontier model access based on the Citizenship of the user.

Let's say Gemini gets to AGI by tomorrow, will my Google account access, or Gemini apps access and data be blocked if I'm not a US citizen? (Anthropic did it with a 5% better model).

If US is classifying the model access based on citizenship, that's similar to treating it as a Defense capability.

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sawjet
2 hours ago
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I, as a US citizen, also cannot access claude fable.
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yathaid
1 hour ago
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You cannot access Fable because Anthropic can't reliably tell whether you are a US citizen. The govt order is based on export controls to non-US citizens.

You can already imagine Anthropic working with a bunch of shady brokers to "remedy" this situation.

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digitaltrees
7 hours ago
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The rule of law exists in other countries in a way it does not in the US right now.
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SubiculumCode
5 hours ago
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Can you give examples?
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digitaltrees
1 hour ago
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Is this a good faith question? It would take several hundred pages to document even a fraction of the violations.

How about deporting people without a hearing or opportunity to present evidence about their charges. And then violating the judges order to turn the planes around.

How about systematically ignoring judicial rulings.

How about detaining people based on the color of their skin and spoken language/accent.

How about violating the emoluments clause of the constitution by accepting a personal airplane.

How about sending your son in-law, who hasn’t been appointed to any office with the advice and consent of congress as required by the constitution.

How about refusing to seat elected congress members for reasons for months.

How about singling out companies like intel for targeted trade restrictions and then demanding equity in order to lift them.

What about threatening to delay or deny a merger of a media company unless your ally is allowed to buy them.

What about refusing to enforce the TikTok ban until you can arrange a buy out to an ally.

What about a formal market with a known price for pardons and commutations.

What about stating multiple wars without congressional approval.

What about creating a fake department named Doge that withholds funds apportioned by congress and breaks contracts that have explicit obligations for payment that results in more termination fees and losses than the savings. All without congressional approval.

How about threatening to withhold federal funds from states with governors of the opposing political party but not your own? Remember the president is supposed to execute the law congress passes not make law or arbitrarily enforce it based on their own political needs or values.

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sinuhe69
3 hours ago
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Searching and seizure of your laptops, including your personal phones without a probable cause or warrant.

Compel you to reveal your secrets, including your passwords by threatening to arrest and detain you without legal proceedings for an unspecified period.

Deny your basic human rights, particularly at the borders, especially if you aren’t a citizen.

And more.

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brandensilva
5 hours ago
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Illegal tariffs, executive usurping congress power of the purse, Noem funding herself and friends with a commercial from an unknown entity with tax payer money, people in ICE/FBI handing over undisclosed unaccounted money in brown bags, insider trading is rampant, using funds inappropriately to fly girlfriend places that isn't official business, illegally using private money to fund public projects, taking bribes from foreign nations like jets and such violating emulation clauses, passing no bid contracts to people you know, using the pardon power inappropriately to pardon crypto scammers and other white collar crimes, moving notorious Epstein related criminals to a low security prison without going through the courts, avoiding justice for sex crimes of the rich, using the DOJ as a political cudgel, and the list goes on.
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sscaryterry
5 hours ago
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Wow, this is a bit obtuse.

It is a commonly accepted "fact" right now, outside the US, that the US is not to be trusted (right now), due to some orange guy, and his mates, manipulating markets, running their mouths, doing all kinds of criminal and/or infantile shit.

I'd say there is quite a bit of evidence for this all around.

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SubiculumCode
4 hours ago
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Hardly obtuse. It's good to be specific when making broad claims. The graft of Trump is a big problem, IMO, but the claim was larger than that, as being something about America's system of Law and Justice, and I don't see these as being completely busted (yet) by the Orange Man
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digitaltrees
1 hour ago
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Sorry but questioning that claim at this point verges on bad faith or credulity.

Ask intel, paramount, TikTok or anthropic if they feel law will be applied equally to all companies.

Ask the blue states that had fema funding withheld when it went to red states.

Ask black families that haven’t gotten reparations when Jan 6 rioters that beat and killed cops to over turn an election will get almost $2b in reparations and then had the Supreme Court throw out their votes in Louisiana in the middle of an election to overturn the voting rights act, redraw districts, overturn their own case law and the principle that judicial review shouldn’t happen too close to an election so they could redraw the districts.

Business leaders are sucking up to curry favor. That by definition isn’t the rule of law it’s the rule of dispensation. It’s the spoils system.

If you have a counter argument you’d better make it now or you will tip your hand.

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SwellJoe
3 hours ago
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It isn't completely busted, unless the Trump administration has a personal interest in overriding the law. As sometimes happens when some foreign power, or just a random politician in another nation, does something he doesn't like. Or, when Trump has a personal stake in some other outcome. Who wants to gamble that Trump won't decide to wreck your businesses, sabotage your defenses, or spy on European citizens? We now know most of the major tech companies won't object to information requests, and probably won't even reveal that they've given access to the US government. US citizens maybe still have some protections, but everyone else seems to be fair game.

Frankly, I'm surprised there's not more urgency on the part of Europeans to reduce dependence on US tech. I don't like it. I'm an American in tech. But, the US can't be trusted, at this time. And, given how irresponsible tech leadership has been, in kowtowing to Trump, I don't see how they can reasonably be trusted, either.

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digitaltrees
1 hour ago
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They are moving swiftly actually. France announced the government is moving to Linux, several other countries are moving off of aws and Microsoft.

I invest in startups and companies at every stage are losing contracts in Europe specifically for this risk. I can’t say who but it’s a multi front trend.

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jimbokun
3 hours ago
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It’s not clear whether Europe has the capability to compete with US tech right now.
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markhahn
1 hour ago
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any US tech? not even for specific purposes? yeah, if there was some kind of forcefield around the US, most of the world would have tech troubles at one level or another. but so would the US.

and really, the topic here is reducing a transgressive President from infringing tech activities elsewhere (used to be mainly about surveillance, but then trump happened).

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SwellJoe
2 hours ago
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It obviously does not. But, there is nothing preventing it. The US has given away all of our foreign scientists, if Europe wants them. All Europe has to do to take the lead in tech is ramp up research spending by an order of magnitude or two to match what the US used to spend (the US still outspends Europe on research, even after massive haphazard cuts and disruptions). Europe also has to welcome immigrants. Another thing many European countries have not always been great at, and some recently have become quite bad about. The regressive nationalist right is ascendant in many places, including some European countries.
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digitaltrees
47 minutes ago
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I am going to ramp up building open source alternatives to every part of the stack. I am encouraging every YC founder to do the same. I am buying as much hardware as I can afford to have my own inference and training stack and funding researchers at Duke and CM to strengthen local and open source AI.

I am also assembling the largest in home robotics training data set available which will be open source.

Want to help?

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iwontberude
3 hours ago
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It’s been cooked for longer than Trump. Al Gore won in 2000 and they stole the election. Everything that followed has been a complete fuckfest.
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MrDrMcCoy
5 hours ago
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Iceland and Switzerland are probably the best places to keep your data safe. I'd put Norway, Sweden, Germany, and the Netherlands after that, though I don't have much specifics on how good they are at privacy these days.
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SilverSlash
3 hours ago
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lol the new "swiss banks". store all your dirty data in digital swiss lockers
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tensor
1 hour ago
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Putting aside reliable rule of law, as others have pointed out, it seems unwise to keep your data in a country that has repeated threatened to annex or invade yours.
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AndrewKemendo
4 hours ago
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No country is safe. You need to host your own end to end on your own infrastructure if you want to be free.

Stallman was correct in the 80s and is correct now about libre software

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jhancock
4 hours ago
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From a legal perspective the US may be safer than other places if the US is the one seeking your data. The US doesn't need legal process to authorize digging into your foreign server.

From a practical perspective, I'm not sure any servers are safe anywhere...depending on who may want your data.

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markhahn
1 hour ago
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I guess you mean assuming your data is stored somewhere in the clear (and whole).

I'm surprised there isn't a lot more attention to encrypted, distributed, erasure-encoded stores.

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uberex
13 minutes ago
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wg0
1 hour ago
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You might dismiss it as nothing but the Linux analogy does not work here either. It is more than that and direct threat to commercial AI labs and their business model. These labs are milking bunch of foundational papers for years now and the end is near.

Going forward would be such open source, open data and open recipe models possibly someday even with the training being crowd sourced if not inference like the BitTorrent model.

Lastly, even Chinese models (GLM, Deepseek, MiMax) work really really good and any user would testify that they do not miss OpenAI/Anthropic/Gemini at all if they're using those Chinese models which is argument enough that with such models, no one is going to miss Chinese models as well.

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pferde
7 hours ago
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For a model that claims to focus on many languages, it's quite unreliable when it comes to simple questions like "how to say X in language Y" or "how to conjugate verb X in language Y". It keeps hallucinating words that do not exist, and when corrected, it only hallucinates a new lie.
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8note
6 hours ago
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it probably doesnt know what language each set of words is referencing.

i doubt they are including a lot of training data labeled with the language.

"how to say X in language Y" is a different task from saying X in language Y

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throwaw12
8 hours ago
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Looks like their instruct models are Llama3.1 fine tune from last year. Is there any progress on new models?

My last hope for soverign AI is from Chinese open models

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kordlessagain
7 hours ago
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Sovereign AI is not about using just one model. It's about using the right model for the right job, and getting them to talk through the solution TOGETHER before presenting the answer.

If you want to mix models like this, check out https://github.com/deepbluedynamics/nemesis8

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naklitechie
37 minutes ago
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What's the community's take on Sovereign AI being funded by states around the world?

Why the emphasis on sovereign? Open is good enough. No?

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zitterbewegung
4 hours ago
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Sort of interesting license not sure if anyone will do it long term.

The training data and the Apertus LLM may contain or generate information that directly or indirectly refers to an identifiable individual (Personal Data). You process Personal Data as independent controller in accordance with applicable data protection law. SNAI will regularly provide a file with hash values for download which you can apply as an output filter to your use of our Apertus LLM. The file reflects data protection deletion requests which have been addressed to SNAI as the developer of the Apertus LLM. It allows you to remove Personal Data contained in the model output. We strongly advise downloading and applying this output filter from SNAI every six months following the release of the model.

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mrshu
6 hours ago
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By far the most impactful product of the Apretus project are the people. To quote a memorable line from Dominique Paul (https://www.thisiscrispin.com/):

> What most people miss IMO is that this is not a team who is doing this for the fourth time like virtually any other LLM provider and who could learn from its own past experiences. I bet if the team would do another model training they could get way better results at one fourth of the costs.

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trvz
8 hours ago
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The previous version of this model has been pretty bad, but claimed to adhere to copyright laws. However, based on my testing, that's not true either. So in my view this is completely useless.
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embedding-shape
8 hours ago
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As long as the following remains true, this release ends up a bigger contribution to science at large than most other models trained "behind closed doors":

> Fully open model: open weights + open data + full training details including all data and training recipes

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coder543
7 hours ago
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Is a recipe useful if no one likes it?

There are equally open, much more useful models out there: https://artificialanalysis.ai/?models=nvidia-nemotron-3-ultr...

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simonw
7 hours ago
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It uses fineweb, which is derived from Common Crawl, which is an unlicensed scrape of web pages.
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markhahn
1 hour ago
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I'm curious how you test; could you explain? Do you have a set of factoids that should be subject to copyright, but are somehow literally (whole work) generated by the model in question?
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reconnecting
6 hours ago
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A chat interface where you can try Apertus:

https://chat.publicai.co

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yreg
8 hours ago
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jawns
6 hours ago
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I am curious about how opt-outs and PII removal work.

Who confirms those requests are legit?

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neom
5 hours ago
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I'm curious to know what stuff like this means for cohere? Their whole value prop is Sovereign AI. It seems they spent a lot of money developing models but own none of their own infra, what is the point of a country spending a lot of money on coheres solutions when stuff like this is becoming increasingly available and usable? Feels like I must be missing something here??
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dTal
7 hours ago
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It's good that there is a movement for open LLMs, but it's not where the battleground is right now. The battleground is local vs service LLMs, and we are losing that battle badly despite all the software being here now and viable, entirely because UX sucks.

How many normal people do you know who use "ChatGPT"? A lot, probably.

How many even know what "Gemma" is, let alone have downloaded llama.cpp, a GGUF file from Hugginface, and run "llama-server" from a text console with all the correct command arguments? How many are thinking about this use case when speccing out their next computer? Where is the breathless marketing copy boasting x tok/s?

We are sleepwalking into slavery.

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627467
6 hours ago
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"Normal people" have never bothered to host their own: photos, music, videos, documents, comunications, etc. To the point that for many their computer is essentially a thin client into someone else's server. Why would we think this same people would care about "personal" inference?
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trollbridge
4 hours ago
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Normal people can go open an account at DeepSeek or Xiaomi and chat away for free. Or, for that matter, a couple other models like z.ai's (GLM-5.2 isn't in the free tier, though, but neither is GPT-5.5-Pro), or Qwen, which does have 3.7-Max for free with no account on their chatbot interface.

Yes, I realise this isn't "running a local model", but it's using models that can be grabbed and run locally. For my pipelines, I feel far more confidence when I use an open model (even one like GLM-5.2 that would be expensive for me to run) since I have a backup plan if the hosted/cloud option becomes unworkable for me. If that happens to me with Opus, I have zero options.

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cdata
5 hours ago
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If our strategy to avoid "slavery" involves "normal people" taking the local-vs-managed choice seriously, we have already lost.

This choice is made for us. The deciding factors will be convenience and economics.

My sense is that just like Web 2.0 SaaS we are destined for servitude.

A better strategy is to play an assymetrical game IMO. Don't let your would-be master write the rules by which you play.

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yeeeloit
4 hours ago
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> A better strategy is to play an assymetrical game IMO. Don't let your would-be master write the rules by which you play.

What do you mean by this? Do you have an example in the given context?

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8note
6 hours ago
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normal people dont really have the hardware to run local models
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Danox
2 hours ago
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As time goes on, they’re almost certainly will be very capable local models in the long run we (general computer users) aren’t going back to the era of mainframe computing no matter how much OpenAI, Meta or Google would like us to.
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manithree
5 hours ago
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They may not right now, but the whole point of Microsoft's Copilot+ PC standard (even though it's somewhat anemic) is to run models locally. Apple Silicon with enough unified memory is capable. Not to mention modern iPhones and Pixels have fairly capable NPUs and routinely run local models. So, we may not be to the point where most normal people have the hardware to run local models, but it is rapidly approaching.
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sosodev
5 hours ago
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They have it, we just haven’t enabled them. The smart model with a chat box is the wrong abstraction for local. Ideally we would have it built into applications as a clear and easy to use opt-in feature. Like allowing a user to index a folder on their hard drive and then search it semantically via embeddings. You could do that on fairly low end hardware these days. Like 2GB of RAM with any processor made within the last 10 years.
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trollbridge
4 hours ago
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Gamers can run Qwen 3.6 quantised models now.

You would also be shocked what's possible on a 64GB Mac Studio, which isn't that unattainable.

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conception
5 hours ago
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Google Edge Gallery is turn key for people and on the device most people chatgpt on. Just like with most Google Stuff “edge gallery” is maybe the worst name possible for “run AI on your phone”!
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theptip
6 hours ago
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Why do you feel the important part _now_ is where the weights get run?

I can see this as a future battleground but access to frontier models (which you cannot run locally) seems a lot more relevant today.

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itkovian_
5 hours ago
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You can’t run a closed llm locally. Strange to frame the dichotomy as between local and open. One begets the other.
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azinman2
6 hours ago
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> We are sleepwalking into slavery.

That’s a bit hyperbolic…

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MrDrMcCoy
5 hours ago
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Some hyperbole is useful. The problem is real and serious, though short of the specific verbiage.
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idiotsecant
7 hours ago
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Better UX does not buy you a datacenter farm to train state of the art cutting edge models. Right now the only people who can do that are the technobility class.
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trollbridge
4 hours ago
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The same used to be true of being able to program computers and compile software.

Of course the frontier will always be unattainable, but that's like pointing out that I couldn't buy my own Cray supercomputer.

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dTal
6 hours ago
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It does not, but it might encourage more people to care. Worrying about training is a luxury when you are starting from a baseline of "OpenAI spies upon me and controls my access". Let's focus on getting every Tom, Dick and Harry 1) on board with LLMs, because they're happening, 2) habitually using local software.
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0gs
6 hours ago
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it's funny because i made this thing (called enough) that aims to make it easy for non-technical people to get up and running with local models quickly, but it is impossible to figure out how to break through the noise. every thread and comment like this breaks my heart a lil bit
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double0jimb0
7 hours ago
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Yea, anyone who understands what makes products actually usable is opting to get paid for said skill.
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bsder
5 hours ago
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> we are losing that battle badly despite all the software being here now and viable, entirely because UX sucks.

Yep. I'm an old time Linux sysadmin, but I am COMPLETELY baffled as to what I can or cannot run on my 32GB R9700 with 128GB main CPU memory.

If I want something Claude or Codex like what do I use that would be useful? If I want a chat system, what do I use? Images--apparently ComfyUI for setup but after that what do I do?

I don't even mind spinning up something in the cloud for a bit, but I need to know how I'm going to get data up and down without racking up massive bandwidth charges.

I'd love to do some tinkering, but the field is moving so fast and so full of charlatans that cleaning the dross out is almost impossible.

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markhahn
1 hour ago
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these days, even completely mainstream distros (Fedora here) include ollama, which leverages a wide range of hardware and range of models. (it's generally useful to install a more recent ollama, though.) there are free coding harnesses too.
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wmf
6 hours ago
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LM Studio
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JSR_FDED
3 hours ago
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From a sovereign AI perspective, how does this compare to Mistral?
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pizlonator
2 hours ago
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> compliant at scale

The jokes write themselves.

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atemerev
8 hours ago
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I use it extensively. It is not ready for agentic use, but as a generic driving model for RAG use cases, it is pretty competent. You can build useful software with it.
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MASNeo
7 hours ago
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I use Apertus including as the driver for an agent, not a coding agent. Find it useful enough. What was your Challenge?
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dangoodmanUT
5 hours ago
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How are they going to be competitive with top models at 70B size?
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kennywinker
1 hour ago
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Qwen et al shows size isn’t actually the only useful metric for an llm.
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holistio
5 hours ago
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Knowledge cutoff is March 2024. Incredible.
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uberex
10 minutes ago
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Does anyone care about this anymore with context windows and tool harnesses.
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_pdp_
7 hours ago
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I want to believe.
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andrewshadura
30 minutes ago
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Not to be confused with Apertium and Apertis.
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nisten
5 hours ago
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As an opesource AI researcher with a lot of models and datasets on huggingface I am very appreciative of these types of project but we are ignoring the elephant in the room here ( or lack of )

the swiss have no gpus

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kennywinker
4 hours ago
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How is this a real problem? Genuine question, because i don’t really understand the urgency of everyone buying up ram and gpus as prices for those skyrocket.

I can run the 8B version of this swiss-ai model on a ten year old GPU. For the larger one, $2000 consumer hardware can run it fine. Beyond that, there are plenty of places where time on a GPU can be rented, and if the model is good, there will be hardware to run it.

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markhahn
49 minutes ago
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why do you say the Swiss have no gpus?
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markab21
5 hours ago
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I'm mildly surprised that more people aren't using Nemo models for this reason. We've moved most of our processing to a combination of Nemo Ultra and Super, with some support for multi-model-specific tasks on Omni. The setup is working REALLY well for us, and I'm comfortable with the more measured pace of improvements. We work with many long-context problems, and the ecosystem is great.

There were a number of use cases where we needed to use Gemini (audio modality), and Ultra has been a VERY cost-effective alternative once we got through the nuances.

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david_shi
4 hours ago
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These models don't seem very competitive, who's their target audience?
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poplarsol
4 hours ago
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Europeans who fetishize "compliance".
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markhahn
47 minutes ago
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residents of the universe who recognize the US as a supply-chain risk.

no, actually, from the docs it sounds mainly motivated by the country's unique linguistic requirements.

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maxloh
7 hours ago
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Great to see more fully open LLMs.

I think a problem with open-weight models is that while you can improve them, you are not going to create the next generation of LLMs by fine-tuning. We are at the mercy of frontier labs for access to SOTA LLMs. For example, Anthropic recently started requiring identity verification for Claude [0], same for OpenAI [1].

If one day China's distillation labs stop releasing their LLMs as open-weight, I doubt American labs will continue to release free LLM weights without that competition.

That's where fully open pipelines shine: they enable the community to create the next generation of SOTA LLMs. That is the only way LLMs truly become sovereign.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48618455

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48618606

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anon373839
7 hours ago
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> China's distillation labs

This notion that Chinese labs are merely distilling frontier models is quite an unwarranted slur. Those labs have published WAY more useful research than US labs on RL techniques, novel model architectures, training pipelines, etc. They have also hit intelligence-per-parameter densities that US labs have yet to attain.

Apart from that, merely training a model on outputs from another model, off policy and without the logits, doesn’t really work that well.

The Chinese labs know how to build frontier level models. GLM-5.2 shows that they no longer even need Nvidia chips to do it.

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trollbridge
4 hours ago
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It's one of those lies people tell themselves to make themselves feel better. "Oh, they're just copying my stuff."

Chinese labs are basically just telling everyone, out in the open, what they're doing and how to do it, and the answer from American frontier labs is "Well, they couldn't possibly be getting the results they're getting without just distilling our models," and the American labs aren't even trying to do some of the stuff like DS's aggressive caching to get costs down.

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Vaslo
6 hours ago
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I recently watched a video for one of these “Chinese Models” it kept insisting it was Claude when the user asked. Sorry, there’s no “slur” here but legit suspicion.
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c0rruptbytes
5 hours ago
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https://blog.kilo.ai/p/did-claude-opus-48-distill-alibabas

it happens to all models…when the internet is increasingly generated, things happen

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anon373839
5 hours ago
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These anecdotes where someone gets the model to claim it is X model are meaningless. (Claude also has been known to claim it is Deepseek when asked in Chinese.)
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trollbridge
4 hours ago
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As anyone who's tried to write an AGENTS.md that says "Place an Assisted-by: git trailer that contains the harness you're using:whatever model this is"; such a naive approach often results in a seemingly random model.
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halJordan
6 hours ago
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But have they? I understand that the Chinese side is illuminated and the American side is dark. I disagree that the Chinese labs have created anything that isn't in an American research lab or production dc. Sure the Chinese have published their findings and not for nothing. But are they novel? Unlikely imo
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chriskanan
5 hours ago
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They are doing ta tremendous amount of novel research where American AI companies have "war rooms" to study their papers and models and American labs publish next to nothing. They have to often do more with less. As an AI researcher, Chinese labs are doing tremendous benefit to science whereas some American companies (and I'm American) seem to think only they are able to do AI research responsibility (I've been working on neural networks for 25+ years). I'm pretty sure Fable sabotaged my research codebase (see the news stories about this).
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david_shi
2 hours ago
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Whoa, say more about Fable sabotaging your codebase?
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dofm
7 hours ago
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> We are at the mercy of frontier labs for access to SOTA LLMs

I disagree with this use of SOTA, and this topic is why.

Anthropic and OpenAI have “cutting-edge” models. These are beyond the state of the art but they are closed, secretive, hard to quantify.

The “state of the art” is open source, open weights models that can be inspected, studied, shared and critiqued, because that is what is meant by “the art” —- it is the knowledge and principles and evidence and materials available to all. The “state of the art” is the highest point of that.

I wish we could make this distinction and stop blessing two secretive, unverifiable loss-making companies with so much power.

(Putting that aside, I suspect — without evidence, mind you - that the endless march to solving models by making them bigger is not the solution anyway.)

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MangoCoffee
4 hours ago
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SOTA LLMs is less important than cheap token and Chinese AI labs is releasing model that is only about 6-8 months behind American AI labs.

Chinese's model like GLM is getting better for coding task and its cheaper. Microsoft Github copilot have to switch billing to token based. the cost of AI have increased since agent come into play. whoever can offer cheaper token to do task will win.

even Microsoft is looking into Deepseek for cheap token.

https://www.axios.com/2026/06/16/microsoft-copilot-cowork-to...

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sockaddr
7 hours ago
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Sorry but I think you’re requirement that something only be “the art” if any arbitrary person can critique it is off. The frontier labs are working on the state of the art but it’s just art that you aren’t allowed to see. Unfortunately.
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dofm
6 hours ago
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It is work using the principles of the art, obviously.

But "state of the art" implies the highest state of general availability, not just in terms of access to some product, but of use of the ideas, concepts, methodologies etc.

Anthropic and OpenAI have "cutting edge" models; the state of the art is behind the cutting edge.

The state of the art is the best open source, open weights model available. More or less by definition.

I am probably tilting at windmills here.

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bnj
5 hours ago
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I appreciate this distinction. The are multiple senses of SOTA and one that has been taking on greater mindshare is as a synonym of “the best available”. By rebasing on SOTA as generally available and understood versus cutting edge, which has limited distribution and leads the way, we expand the vocabulary we have available to describe what’s going on. Thanks.
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toss1
4 hours ago
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That's an interesting and possibly useful distinction , but it seems unique to you. Spreading it as "We should categorize the AIs this way" would be a good argument.

But the way SOTA is generally understood by other users of the language, it refers to exactly the team, technology, & techniques defining the cutting edge in any field, regardless of the whether the technology & techniques are available outside of that team...

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8note
6 hours ago
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the art is the standard engineering practices that go into building the thing

its things you would be trained in as part of a bachelor's degree and some graduate coursework

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