Open LLM Builders Summit
International summit series I co-organize with the Swiss AI Initiative, uniting the teams behind Apertus, Ai2, GLM, Qwen, Nemotron, and K2. Three editions: Geneva, Lausanne, Zurich.
The Open LLM Builders Summit is a recurring, invite-only gathering of the teams building open large language models worldwide, hosted by the Swiss AI Initiative through the ETH AI Center and EPFL AI Center. I co-organize the series, which convenes roughly twice a year. Each edition brings together open-source and open-weight model initiatives, compute and infrastructure providers, researchers, and policymakers to move global collaboration on open models from aspiration to implementation.
3rd edition — Zurich, 30 September 2026
Hosted at the ETH AI Center as an official event of the Zurich AI Festival 2026. The program features progress updates from major open-source and open-weight initiatives — including Nemotron (NVIDIA) and K2 (MBZUAI) — a poster session, breakout discussions, and a closing panel on global collaboration, with a focus on sustainable and competitive funding models for open AI. Speakers include Imanol Schlag, Martin Jaggi, Antoine Bosselut, Jeff Hammerbacher, Ahmad Chamma, and Matthias Bethge, among others.
2nd edition — Lausanne, 9 February 2026
Hosted at EPFL, with presentations from open-model builders including GLM (Z.ai) and Qwen (Alibaba). The central question: how can open LLMs scale globally without losing the agility, diversity, and innovation that define them? Breakout sessions and a closing plenary led by the Scientific Committee — Antoine Bosselut (EPFL), Joost VandeVondele (CSCS), Imanol Schlag (ETH Zurich), and Valentina Pyatkin (Ai2) — surfaced concrete themes: sharing the full training pipeline rather than just weights (data mixtures, filtering, evaluation, negative results), moving from open models to open systems with serving infrastructure and feedback loops, and navigating regulatory and geopolitical fragmentation.
1st edition — Geneva, July 2025
The inaugural International Open-Source LLM Builders Summit gathered around 50 leading global initiatives and organizations dedicated to open-source LLMs and trustworthy AI. Participants got a first preview of Apertus, Switzerland’s fully open, multilingual language model developed by EPFL, ETH Zurich, and CSCS, which was released under Apache 2.0 later that summer.