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Switzerland Launches Its Own Open-Source AI Model
How to restore an old photo with Nano Banana
Gary Acosta
September 04, 2025
In partnership with
Welcome to another edition of Horizon AI,
A consortium of Swiss research institutes has introduced a new family of language models as a transparent, privacy-focused alternative to commercial systems like ChatGPT.
Let’s jump into it!
Read Time: 4.5 min
Here's what's new today in the Horizon AI
Switzerland Launches "Transparent" ChatGPT Alternative
Apple May Tap Google to Power Siri’s New AI Search
AI Tutorial: How to restore an old photo with Nano Banana
AI Tools to check out
AI Findings/Resources
The Latest in AI and Tech 💡
AI News
APERTUS
Switzerland Launches "Transparent" ChatGPT Alternative
Switzerland just released Apertus, a fully open-source (not just open-weight) AI model designed as an alternative to offerings from US and Chinese tech companies.
Details:
The model’s source code, weights, training data, and detailed development process are available on Hugging Face.
It was trained on over 1,000 languages and comes in two sizes: 8B and 70B parameters.
Apertus was designed to comply with the European Union’s copyright laws and voluntary AI code of practice, trained only on public sources while respecting AI crawler opt-out requests.
The model is only comparable in performance to Meta’s Llama 3 from 2024, but its goal is not to compete with the massive budgets of leading AI firms. Instead, it aims to provide "safer and more accessible AI system for scientific researchers and commerce."
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APPLE
Apple May Tap Google to Power Siri’s New AI Search
Apple is building an AI search feature for Siri, and Google is the front-runner to help. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman says Apple is testing a custom Gemini model on its own servers to generate answers from the web, with a new system inside Siri called “World Knowledge Answers.”
Details:
“World Knowledge Answers” is an internal Siri feature that will search the web and return AI-written summaries that can include text, photos, videos, and points of interest.
Under the hood, Siri would get a major revamp: a planner to interpret prompts, a search layer to scan device data and the internet, and a summarizer to package the results for the user.
Apple and Google have reached a formal agreement this week to test a Google-designed AI model for Siri’s summaries.
The company plans to use its own models to search user data, while still evaluating Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s Gemini for Siri’s planning function.
Despite the iPhone 17 launch expected next week, the AI-upgraded Siri is still slated to arrive with iOS 26.4 as early as March.
AI Tutorial
How to restore an old photo with Nano Banana
Go to the Gemini website (or the mobile app) and select the Gemini 2.5 Flash model. You can also go to Google AI Studio and select the Nano Banana/gemini-2.5-flash-image-preview model.
Use this prompt:
"This is a technical and stylistic re-rendering of a vintage photograph. The goal is to make this exact scene—with the same people, outfits, poses, and scenery—look as if it were captured today by an elite portrait photographer using modern, professional equipment and a vibrant color grading style. Do not change any element of the scene; instead, fundamentally transform the quality of the image capture itself. 1. Vibrant, Saturated Color Science (New Priority): This is the most important instruction: The color grading must be completely modernized, vibrant, and deeply saturated. Remove every trace of the original's faded, vintage color cast. The final colors should pop with life and energy, emulating a modern digital camera using a 'Vivid' color profile. Specifically: Make any floral patterns rich and bold. Render solid colors as strong, clean, and striking. * Ensure all skin tones are warm, healthy, and full of life—completely avoiding a pale, washed-out, or muted appearance. 2. Lighting Transformation: Completely discard the original's harsh, on-camera flash lighting. Re-light the entire scene as if using a professional, off-camera studio setup. Create a large, soft key light coming from the front-left to sculpt the subjects' faces with gentle, flattering shadows, creating depth and dimension. Add a subtle fill light from the right to soften the shadows. Eliminate the harsh glare on any glasses and create bright, sparkling catchlights in everyone's eyes. 3. Hyper-Realistic Detail and Texture: Render the image with extreme 8K clarity. Skin must look natural, retaining age-appropriate pores and fine lines—strictly avoid a plastic or airbrushed appearance. The fabric textures must be hyper-defined: clearly show any intricate knitting, weaves of patterns, and texture of upholstery. Any wallpaper pattern should be sharp and clear. 4. Modern Camera and Lens Optics: The final image must look like it was captured on a high-end, full-frame digital camera with a sharp 85mm prime lens to create a subtle, natural separation between the subjects and the background. Ensure the dynamic range is wide, with deep, rich blacks and clean, controlled highlights. Negative Prompt: desaturated colors, muted tones, pale skin, vintage color cast, faded or yellowed colors, on-camera flash, harsh shadows, flat lighting, glare, film grain, plastic skin, changing the background or clothing."
After you get your image, you can download or share it, or request further changes such as hair color, eye color, or clothing.
AI Tools to check out
👀 TaskGPT: Chat with your Mac, tell it what to do.
⭐ Wanderboat: Explore the best places and events in your local area or for your travel.
✅ Glif: Creative agent platform for builders.
🌐 UseArticle: Turn any product url into profitable affiliate website.
🐱 CatDoes: Team of AI agents build mobile apps for you & your business.
AI Findings/Resources
📝 A one stop repository for generative AI research updates, interview resources, notebooks and much more
✅ Six text-to-image prompting tips for Nano Banana
👨💻 Techniques for coding with AI tools: Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, etc.
The latest in AI and Tech
The finance chief of Elon Musk's xAI, Mike Liberatore, has left the AI startup, marking the latest in a string of recent high-profile executive departures.
The French AI startup Mistral AI is finalizing a €2 billion investment at a post-money valuation of $14 billion, according to Bloomberg, positioning it as one of Europe’s most valuable tech startups.
Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company, the New York–based startup behind the Arc and Dia browsers, in a $610 million cash deal. According to reports, OpenAI and Perplexity also considered acquiring the startup.
DuckDuckGo’s $9.99 per month subscription is also adding VPN and an information removal tool.
PayPal is giving its customers, including Venmo users, early access to Perplexity’s new AI-powered browser, Comet, along with a free one-year subscription to Perplexity Pro, normally priced at $200 annually.
That’s a wrap!
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Gina 👩🏻💻