We present Apertus, a fully open suite of large language models (LLMs) designed to address two systemic shortcomings in today's open model ecosystem: data compliance and multilingual representation. Unlike many prior models that release weights without reproducible data pipelines or regard for content-owner rights, Apertus models are pretrained exclusively on openly available data, retroactively respecting `robots.txt` exclusions and filtering for non-permissive, toxic, and personally identifiable content. To mitigate risks of memorization, we adopt the Goldfish objective during pretraining, strongly suppressing verbatim recall of data while retaining downstream task performance. The Apertus models also expand multilingual coverage, training on 15T tokens from over 1800 languages, with ~40% of pretraining data allocated to non-English content. Released at 8B and 70B scales, Apertus approaches state-of-the-art results among fully open models on multilingual benchmarks, rivalling or surpassing open-weight counterparts. Beyond model weights, we release all scientific artifacts from our development cycle with a permissive license, including data preparation scripts, checkpoints, evaluation suites, and training code, enabling transparent audit and extension.

Semantic map models visualize systematic relations among semantic functions through graph structures and are widely used in linguistic typology. However, existing construction methods either depend on labor-intensive expert reasoning or on fully automated systems lacking expert involvement, creating a tension between scalability and interpretability. We introduce \textbf{XISM}, an interactive system that combines data-driven inference with expert knowledge. XISM generates candidate maps via a top-down procedure and allows users to iteratively refine edges in a visual interface, with real-time metric feedback. Experiments in three semantic domains and expert interviews show that XISM improves linguistic decision transparency and controllability in semantic-map construction while maintaining computational efficiency. XISM provides a collaborative approach for scalable and interpretable semantic-map building. The system\footnote{https://app.xism2025.xin/} , source code\footnote{https://github.com/hank317/XISM} , and demonstration video\footnote{https://youtu.be/m5laLhGn6Ys} are publicly available.

'The biggest decision yet': Jared Kaplan on allowing AI to train itself Anthropic's chief scientist says AI autonomy could spark a beneficial'intelligence explosion' - or be the moment humans lose control Humanity will have to decide by 2030 whether to take the "ultimate risk" of letting artificial intelligence systems train themselves to become more powerful, one of the world's leading AI scientists has said. Jared Kaplan, the chief scientist and co-owner of the $180bn (£135bn) US startup Anthropic, said a choice was looming about how much autonomy the systems should be given to evolve. The move could trigger a beneficial "intelligence explosion" - or be the moment humans end up losing control. In an interview about the intensely competitive race to reach artificial general intelligence (AGI) - sometimes called superintelligence - Kaplan urged international governments and society to engage in what he called "the biggest decision". Anthropic is part of a pack of frontier AI companies including OpenAI, Google DeepMind, xAI, Meta and Chinese rivals led by DeepSeek, racing for AI dominance. Its widely used AI assistant, Claude, has become particularly popular among business customers.

In a new series of interviews, we're meeting some of the PhD students that were selected to take part in the Doctoral Consortium at the European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI-2025) . In the second interview of the series, we caught up with Frida Hartman to find out how her PhD is going so far, and plans for the next steps in her investigations. Frida, along with co-authors Mario Mirabile and Michele Dusi, was also the winner of the ECAI-2025 Diversity & Inclusion Competition, for work entitled . This award was presented at the closing ceremony of the conference. Could start by giving us a quick introduction to yourself and the topic that you're working on?

With the rapid uptake of generative AI, investigating human perceptions of generated responses has become crucial. A major challenge is their `aptitude' for hallucinating and generating harmful contents. Despite major efforts for implementing guardrails, human perceptions of these mitigation strategies are largely unknown. We conducted a mixed-method experiment for evaluating the responses of a mitigation strategy across multiple-dimensions: faithfulness, fairness, harm-removal capacity, and relevance. In a within-subject study design, 57 participants assessed the responses under two conditions: harmful response plus its mitigation and solely mitigated response. Results revealed that participants' native language, AI work experience, and annotation familiarity significantly influenced evaluations. Participants showed high sensitivity to linguistic and contextual attributes, penalizing minor grammar errors while rewarding preserved semantic contexts. This contrasts with how language is often treated in the quantitative evaluation of LLMs. We also introduced new metrics for training and evaluating mitigation strategies and insights for human-AI evaluation studies.

Automated personality and soft skill assessment from multimodal behavioral data remains challenging due to limited datasets and methods that fail to capture geometric structure inherent in human traits. We introduce RecruitView, a dataset of 2,011 naturalistic video interview clips from 300+ participants with 27,000 pairwise comparative judgments across 12 dimensions: Big Five personality traits, overall personality score, and six interview performance metrics. To leverage this data, we propose Cross-Modal Regression with Manifold Fusion (CRMF), a geometric deep learning framework that explicitly models behavioral representations across hyperbolic, spherical, and Euclidean manifolds. CRMF employs geometry-specific expert networks to capture hierarchical trait structures, directional behavioral patterns, and continuous performance variations simultaneously. An adaptive routing mechanism dynamically weights expert contributions based on input characteristics. Through principled tangent space fusion, CRMF achieves superior performance while training 40-50% fewer trainable parameters than large multimodal models. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CRMF substantially outperforms the selected baselines, achieving up to 11.4% improvement in Spearman correlation and 6.0% in concordance index. Our RecruitView dataset is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/AI4A-lab/RecruitView

Standardized surveys scale efficiently but sacrifice depth, while conversational interviews improve response quality at the cost of scalability and consistency. This study bridges the gap between these methods by introdu cing a framework for AI - assisted conversational interviewing. To evaluate this framework, we conducted a web survey experiment where 1,800 p articipants were randomly assigned to AI ' chatbots ' which use large language models (LLMs) to dynamically probe respondents for elaboration and interactively code open - ended responses to fixed questions developed by human researchers . We assessed the AI chatbot's performance in terms of coding accuracy, response quality, and respondent experience. Our findings reveal that AI chatbots perform moderately well in live coding even without survey - specific fine - tuning, despite slightly inflated false positive err ors due to respondent acquiescence bias. Open - ended responses were more detailed and informative, but this came at a slight cost to respondent experience. Our findings highlight the feasibility of using AI methods such as chatbots enhanced by LLMs to enhance open - ended data collection in web surveys. 2

Prince William says he's'not in a calm state' as he arrives at the BAFTAs amid Andrew arrest drama: Prince of Wales says he's not in right frame of mind to watch weepy contender Hamnet - as Kate reveals it left her in floods of tears Who is Austin Tucker Martin? It's sensational, but William and Kate are the real King and Queen now. Read what my royal insiders are saying... it's the only way: MAUREEN CALLAHAN Tulsi Gabbard's personal life with mysterious videographer husband revealed in new intimate pictures I've met the man of my dreams... if he discovers my dirty little secret, he'll be disgusted: DEAR JANE JFK Jr took drugs'every single day': Everyone knows about Carolyn Bessette's cocaine snorting and cheating. But friends hid his binges, experimental sex and Jackie Kennedy's gay fears... until now Tide turns for little abandoned monkey Punch who had no one to love but his stuffed toy... as he's finally accepted into family Moment tourist minibus sinks in the world's deepest lake killing seven after crashing through the frozen ice Tucker Carlson forced to apologize to Israel's president for implying he went to Epstein's pedo island My American friends are all whispering the same rancid royal rumor. It's not just Andrew... this could bring everyone down: KENNEDY The Alexander brothers' alleged'rape playbook': Almost too monstrous to read, an exhaustive account of hideous secrets dating back to high school Vulgar squatter lazed around $2.3m mansion all day and sent child to work in BAKERY to help pay the bills... but now karma has caught up with her in the most delicious way The show must go on!

In the Swiss Alps, a plan to tidy up Romansh--spoken by less than one per cent of the country--set off a decades-long quarrel over identity, belonging, and the sound of authenticity. After reformers launched Rumantsch Grischun, a standardized version of Romansh's various dialects, traditionalists denounced it as a "bastard," a "castrated" tongue, an act of "linguistic murder." Ask him how it all began, and he remembers the ice. It was a bitter morning in January, 1982, when Bernard Cathomas, aged thirty-six, carefully picked his way up a slippery, sloping Zurich street. His destination was No. 33, an ochre house with green shutters--the home of Heinrich Schmid, a linguist at the University of Zurich. Inside, the décor suggested that "professor" was an encompassing identity: old wooden floors, a faded carpet, a living room seemingly untouched since the nineteen-thirties, when Schmid had grown up in the house. Schmid's wife served, a Swiss carrot cake that manages bourgeois indulgence with a vegetable alibi. Cathomas had already written from Chur, in the canton of the Grisons, having recently become the general secretary of the Lia Rumantscha, a small association charged with protecting Switzerland's least known national language, Romansh. Spoken by less than one per cent of the Swiss population, the language was itself splintered into five major "idioms," not always readily intelligible to one another, each with its own spelling conventions. Earlier attempts at unification had collapsed in rivalries. In his letter, Cathomas said that Schmid's authority would be valuable in standardizing the language. Cathomas wrote in German but started and ended in his native Sursilvan, the biggest of the Romansh idioms: " ." Translation: "I thank you very much for your interest and attention to this problem." Schmid, the man he was counting on, hadn't grown up speaking Romansh; he first learned it in high school, and later worked on the "Dicziunari Rumantsch Grischun," a Romansh dictionary begun in 1904 and still lumbering toward completion.

Trump's'real' plan for ending war in Ukraine'revealed': $300 BILLION boost to America and joint space missions with Russia to Mars... but Putin may still have the last laugh Details of Trump's secret phone call with Venezuelan leader emerge as Pentagon hits back at chilling'kill everybody' message America's second-largest county offers new program giving residents $500 a month with no strings attached Fugitive football coach Travis Turner'left home with a firearm' before vanishing amid child porn allegations Calls for Anthony Fauci be prosecuted amid Trump's autopen declaration... while Biden also faces charge threat Why breaking up with Prince Harry was the'best thing that ever happened' to Chelsy Davy: SARAH RAINEY reveals why she's'never been happier' - and how she would have hated the'Montecito madness' There's always been whispers about Tupac's sexuality... now for first time, friends and the boys he kissed share flamboyant tales of eyeshadow, nail varnish and his secret'longings' Keith Urban linked to NEW woman, 25: Friends tell how Nicole Kidman divorce drama has reignited with petty Nashville standoff... and why he has the kids for Thanksgiving Female shopper is SPAT on while browsing aisles of iconic Portland book store in suspected'bias crime' Cheerleader, 18, 'fought for her life' as she was killed on cruise ship, aunt says, as stepbrother, 16, faces questions over his alleged involvement Trump to pardon drug trafficking former Honduran president saying he was treated'very harshly and unfairly' Secret war tearing apart $70M power couple: Dark reason their marriage is spinning out of control... after 10-hour livestreamed mega fight The cruel truth behind Bianca Wallace's loving hospital snap of her and Ioan Gruffudd's new'angel child'... and who I feel most sorry for in this sickening saga: AMANDA PLATELL Bianca Censori's little sister Angelina goes completely makeup-free as she steps out in the affluent suburb Toorak The Kennedy brother who put a pillow over Marilyn Monroe's face as she screamed... and a deathbed phone call promised to'shock the whole world' - by author JAMES PATTERSON What would happen if the sun started to dim? Scientists have revealed the terrifying answer to this question, which is the subject of the upcoming science fiction blockbuster, Project Hail Mary. The film, based on a novel of the same name by The Martian author, Andy Weir, follows a lone scientist on a mission to uncover why the sun is dimming. In the movie, which is set to hit cinemas in March 2026, the sun's brightness is predicted to fall one per cent in a year and five per cent in 20 years. These numbers might sound small. But in reality, scientists say that these changes would be more than enough to wipe out humanity.