Dr. Imanol Schlag

Imanol Schlag is a research scientist at the ETH AI Center and co-leads Apertus, the large language model of the Swiss AI Initiative. He also leads the research engineering unit of the Swiss National AI Institute and teaches the course Large-Scale AI Engineering at ETH Zürich.

Apertus was released in 2025 by EPFL, ETH Zürich and the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre. It comes in versions with 8 and 70 billion parameters and was trained on more than 1,000 languages, including Swiss German and Romansh. Its architecture, weights, training data and methods are all published. Schlag was the project's technical lead, and Apertus received a special prize at the Global Swiss AI Award 2025.

He came to research through an apprenticeship in informatics at a Swiss bank. He then took a BSc in computer science at FHNW and an MSc in artificial intelligence at the University of St Andrews. In 2023 he completed his PhD with distinction at USI and IDSIA under Jürgen Schmidhuber, working on systematic generalisation and fast weight programmers. Along the way he did research internships at Meta, Google and Microsoft.