What the Swiss can teach us about tech

The Minister of Science, Innovation and Technology Shane Reti recently announced an investment in an AI partnership with Singapore – and well he might, given the city-state has a compelling national AI strategy that our nation can learn from.

But is it time for Dr Reti to look further afield? To be more ambitious for AI in Aotearoa and find out what we can learn from Switzerland? The country’s top university ETH is on the brink of releasing a Large Language Model (LLM), reports of which appear at first glance to be very exciting, notably:

• The LLM will be open sourced. All documentation will include the model architecture, training methods, and usage guidelines to enable transparent reuse and further development.
• It will be multilingual by design. It’s been trained on a large text dataset of over 1500 languages, with around 40% non-English languages. Being multilingual by design opens up collaboration across communities and nations. Imagine what a Pacific LLM could achieve in terms of creating AI opportunities for everyone? In Vanuatu alone around 138 languages are spoken.

This quote from in a report on the ETH Zurich website explains the reasons for the open source approach:

“As scientists from public institutions, we aim to advance open models and enable organisations to build on them for their own applications”, says Antoine Bosselut.

“By embracing full openness — unlike commercial models that are developed behind closed doors — we hope that our approach will drive innovation in Switzerland, across Europe, and through multinational collaborations. Furthermore, it is a key factor in attracting and nurturing top talent,” says EPFL professor Martin Jaggi.

How refreshing that an LLM is created for the public good, not the private purse. Although an article in Slater notes that the Swiss LLM will not be in quite the same league, in terms of capability, as the likes of Grok and OpenAI, “its design makes it well-suited for cases such as multilingual chatbots, customer support, text summarization, translation, academic research, and public-sector applications, particularly where transparency and regulatory compliance are key.”

As it stands today, AI development is arguably being driven by a handful of private tech companies and China. The venture capitalist firm BOND, notes in its report Trends and Artificial Intelligence that the ‘big six’ (Apple, NVIDIA, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta) are “loaded with cash (estimated up to $389 billion in free cash flow over ten years) to spend on AI and CapEx.”

Is it time to invest in alternatives. For New Zealand to be ambitious for itself, and for our Pacific neighbours too?

The Swiss LLM is enabled by Alps, Switzerland’s national supercomputer in Lugano, which is powered by NVIDIA chips and renewable energy. This from the ETH Zurich report:

“Training this model is only possible because of our strategic investment in ‘Alps’, a supercomputer purpose-built for AI,” says Thomas Schulthess, Director of CSCS and professor at ETH Zurich. “Our enduring collaboration with NVIDIA and HPE exemplifies how joint efforts between public research institutions and industry leaders can drive sovereign infrastructure, fostering open innovation — not just for Switzerland, but for science and society worldwide.”

New Zealand doesn’t have those things — a supercomputer and a relationship with NVIDIA — but we do have the ability to produce cheap, renewable energy, which is what powers the datacentres that enable AI. As the BOND report notes: “there is no AI without energy”.

“To understand where energy infrastructure is heading, it helps to examine the rising tension between AI capability and electrical supply. The growing scale and sophistication of artificial intelligence is demanding an extraordinary amount of computational horsepower, primarily from AI-focused data centers. These facilities – purpose-built to train and serve models – are starting to rival traditional heavy industry in their electricity consumption.”

We’ve opened our empty skies to the aerospace industry with great enthusiasm. Why not turn our focus to finding out what could be achieved if we had national plan to create renewable energy sources that would power large (actually very, very, very large) datacentres to enable AI for the good of our people — right here in Aotearoa and the Pacific?

This Government has declared it is taking a ‘light touch’ approach to AI. But if AI is truly transformational, then I’d argue the opposite is what’s needed. Let us instead find out more about what the clever Swiss are up to — and pronto!