Category: Information Technology

The Case: A new study by the KOF Institute at ETH Zurich reveals for the first time which professions in Switzerland have been particularly affected by ChatGPT and similar AI systems. The Commentary: Since late 2022 unemployment has been rising significantly faster in occupations with high AI exposure, with young…

The Case: According to privatim, the conference of Swiss data protection officers, outsourcing particularly sensitive or confidential personal data, such as tax details or medical information, to cloud services operated by international providers is generally not permitted. The Commentary: Swiss authorities have virtually no way of verifying whether global cloud…

The Case: “AI and generative AI technologies are advancing rapidly, while the regulatory framework is still developing in many places.” – Source UBS The Commentary: Raiffeisen rolled out Microsoft Copilot group-wide in spring 2024 in order to support all employees.

The Case: Hacker group AKIRA has significantly been escalateing its ransomware operations in Switzerland in recent months. The Commentary: To date around 200 companies have been targeted, resulting in damages amounting to several million Swiss francs domestically—and several hundred million US dollars globally.

The Case: The first six months since the introduction of the obligation to report cyber-attacks on critical infrastructure have ended on a positive note. This was reported in a statement by the Federal Office for Cyber Security (FCOS). The Commentary: In this time period, 164 attacks were recorded. The most…

The Case: OECD encourages responsible use of AI by governments to strengthen efficiency, effectiveness and trust. The Commentary: According to a new OECD report, the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) in public administrations has been growing though governments are faced with a range of challenges in scaling up AI applications,…

The Case: EPFL, ETH Zurich and the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) have released Apertus, Switzerland’s first large-scale open, multilingual language model — a milestone in generative AI for transparency and diversity. The Commentary: Trained on 15 trillion tokens across more than 1,000 languages (40 % of the data is…

The Case: The Swiss e-ID functions like a digital identity card. The Commentary: “It is an official means of identification issued by the government and is a free and optional addition to the physical identity card. To best protect people’s privacy both online and in the real world, the e-ID…

The Case: Advances in mathematics require creativity, perhaps even a genius. At the moment, AI is not up to this, the question is how this human stronghold is going to withstand AI. The Commentary: AI demonstrates “artificial intuition,” i.e. impressive heuristic performance in formal patterns. At present, it cannot yet…

The Case: AI development is showing some exciting approaches and AI might head down the road of research. The Commentary: Recent advances, like Meta’s Self‑Taught Evaluator, DeepSeek AI + Tsinghua’s SPCT/GRM, AI Descartes, Google DeepMind’s AlphaEvolve, GPT‑4 as “reticular chemist,” and Stanford’s creative idea generation are groundbreaking indeed. They show…

The Case: Palantir is a software company specializing in powerful data-driven platforms that help clients, ranging from military and intelligence agencies to commercial enterprises, turn disparate data into actionable insights. The Commentary: According to NZZ, American CEO Alexander Karp has been developing software as a weapon. Karp is not known…

The Case: Recently, thousands of ChatGPT conversations were freely accessible via Google. The Commentary: What was intended to be a private conversation ended up online unintentionally. The incident shows how quickly private AI conversations can become public. This is why you must not enter any personal data into AI tools…