ETH Zurich and EPFL to release a LLM developed on public infrastructure

I hope they do well. AFAIK they’re training or finetuning an older LLaMA model, so performance might lag behind SOTA. But what really matters is that ETH and EPFL get hands-on experience training at scale. From what I’ve heard, the new AI cluster still has teething problems. A lot of people underestimate how tough it is to train models at this scale, especially on your own infra.

Disclaimer: I’m Swiss and studied at ETH. We’ve got the brainpower, but not much large-scale training experience yet. And IMHO, a lot of the “magic” in LLMs is infrastructure-driven.

I'd be more concerned about the size used being 70b (deepseek r1 has 671b) which makes catching up with SOTA kinda more difficult to begin with.