Swiss Inference Utility
MEETING NOTES 11.10.2025

PARTICIPANTS:

Oleg

    Effinger, Bern, community, nature game launch (Unpetrified by Dreamhunt Studio)

Vasco

    Bern, Maths to ML, LLM at work, open for questions!

Sabine

    Zürich, Swiss {ai} Weeks, marketing, events, data science (studying), MCP tool for Swiss voting system worked on local

Natalia

    Zürich, project manager, interested in open source, Swiss AI, coordinating, documentation

Cole

    Canada, payments engineering, ICML 2025

Josh

    Happy to join

Joseph

    Late, listening in


DISCUSSION

Infrstrastructure of tools and services

Set-up meeting, continuing from the ones before - and quite open to any inputs that you and the others have.

On BBB - Josh can't turn on microphone and video at the same time. In a loud space, keeping words short, looks forward to contributing & participating.

Open questions on status of the Swiss inference

    how is the usage trending?


Aktive Benutzer: 1534
Not a very reliable/exact number.
We can also use 3rd party uptime trackers
Hackathons in Spain are resulting in spikes to the developer API - the number is across all models and users.
There is an internal dashboard that can't be shared yet, but would be open to sharing a screenshot once a week.
What would be the basic KPI? Basic information about the campaign and strategy. Would like to know who is building Apertus prototype, video series. Referencing Public AI, most people Sabine has talked to did not know about it.

    are we getting survey responses?


"How has your experience using Apertus been? Let us know at https://forms.gle/9TGSfTK1RfKj2b6X9 ..."

Anna has prepared a form which is integrated into the interface, and Oleg gave her some feedback. Josh: it is anonymous, and like the dashboard the information should be made public. We don't have the time right now to make that available. Our priority is to not expose the private user information and conversations. Let's just ask :) The link has not yet been sent to the API developers, only in the frontend, and we would probably ask a very different set of questions.

Josh is excited about the future version, an opportunity to change the minds of people in the media and our communities. Sabine agrees that in public events promoting the model is hard, the feedback is strange, sometimes even laughing about it. Keep trying! What would help is to showcase prototypes that work. Maybe even showing limitations. I couldn't find many yet. Iseca (?) is working on something interesting. Start with hackathon participants? Tibetan Chatbot.

Vasco: you can click share the link of a chat, and opening the link opens a public session. Is it possible that people can share conversations? Transparency is the most valuable thing that Apertus offers. Cole's project from earlier this week is interesting and worth pushing (we discuss it further down).

Josh: sharing your chats is different from the feedback. Thumbs up / thumbs down is something we can make public. There were last time about 2'800 feedbacks of this kind. We can probably just share them in the channel. .. How do we get better feedback? Joseph did a presentation about Public AI+, in which there was a presentation about a Data Contribution Flywheel. It is a more sophisticated feedback mechanism that is already online. (Send us a message if you're not already on Public AI+...) This is a step towards making Public AI actually open.

Joseph: if you're having a conversation, users can click a "data flywheel" button which adds a row to a dataset on Hugging Face. It adds context and allows the user to decide how they want to be attributed, how much personal data they want to share (Cole notes: PII sweep). As a developer I'm quite familiar with application crash recorders that send info to developers, sometimes even create an item in an issue tracker. Not production ready, this is a demo but there are students working on productionizing this. We need some mechanisms, marketing about what we are doing here.

Josh: many people are based around Zürich, and if you are there on the 15th let's hang out! We can try to meet on Saturday at 1PM near the AI Centre, Oleg, Sabine, Vasko in the evening?
Oleg's running DINAcon next week and would like to hear about your own upcoming #events and suggestions to meet up any time.

It's important that we start to document all decisions and action items in a shared, collaborative repo, i.e. not on this Slack, not just a messy Proton or Google doc. Ideally also not on GitHub, though we can start within forpublicai. Going forward, I would like to support a local provider like Codey.
Proposal to get started with a Hugging Face space linked to GitHub:
https://huggingface.co/swiu

We can together go through the Excalidraw, moodboard a little more or just pick out the good stuff and start coding a website.
Editing link https://link.excalidraw.com/l/71IEdlODkrp/6WN4PRESo1A

Cole tells us about the idea that he had from the moodboard: inspired by OlmoTrace, he would like openness to be more of a competitive advantage. Let's think big with the Trace Mechanism concept from Ai2, make it more generalizable and take it further. Could be a good utility, cost being potentially prohibitive at this point, latency can be best effort at this point. We could (Wikipedia like) generate metadata from people's attribution efforts.

Proposal from Cole "I had an idea for a project based off the mood board (XAI related)"
https://docs.google.com/document/d/12pEUMhPzlKuhQ3PXFU71sfGjaHrZ99LBUJcobxpnbIk/edit?usp=sharing

ACTION ITEMS FOR COLE:
Trace project go ahead proposal, scoping, HLDs + LLDS (all basics)
AI2 collab maybe

Oleg has been interested in data traceability for a while and has collected notes and done experiments in the Proxeus project. Open Knowledge has a Frictionless Data project that aims to distribute data authorship, which has been the basis of most of this.

We might do something in the future with Ai2 around multimodal projects. Think about how we could do experiments - quickly, but scientifically. And Stay Tuned! There is a prod database which cannot be exposed, even though everything wants to be as open source as possible. To get around that you could sign a legal agreement, especially if there's a concrete plan to implement something. Truly open way would be to firewall the sensitive stuff. We don't have a staging server, Swiss AI approached us a month and a half before they launched.

Oleg suggests having a shared infrastructured to do things in a safe sandboxed way. Not a bad idea, says Josh, but what would that take in terms of giving permissions? Cole suggests mocking the API, or using a smaller model. For local development there's no point of having many permissions. Let's do it!

Oleg, aren't we talking about this?
https://github.com/forpublicai/open-webui
https://github.com/forpublicai/platform.publicai.co
Josh: there's not enough documentation. Zuplo and some other cloud services are not open source, there are some aspects of the infrastructure that are not available. Open WebUI is not as open source as it was before.

We should give you some permissions, like what you already have in Public AI+, which you can do by using the site locally.

Oleg says that in the context of starting an association, we need to work on the pitch to build bridges between the self-hosted Apertus and public AI service.

Josh says we should work offline to work out these issues and have room for engineering conversation as well :)

Vasco and Oleg stay on for a few more minutes to discuss the moodboard, agreeing to try to meet again in the days ahead, and put together a small proposal website by Monday.