Public AI Is the New Multilateralism

WASHINGTON, DC - An international coalition of AI labs and cloud providers just did something refreshingly practical: they pooled their compute resources to make Apertus, a Swiss-built open-source large language model (LLM), freely accessible to users around the world. The queries Apertus receives might be served by Amazon Web Services in Switzerland, Exoscale in Austria, AI Singapore, Cudo Compute in Norway, the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre, or Australia's National Computational Infrastructure. Could this project point the way forward for international cooperation? In the 20th century, international cooperation became practically synonymous with the rules-based multilateral order, underpinned by treaty-based institutions such…