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Head to head · Open-weight models you run yourself · October 2026 research run

Apertus v1.5 8B vs MiniCPM-o 4.5

Apertus v1.5 8B and MiniCPM-o 4.5 score within a point of each other on agent readiness, 61 (C) and 61 (C). MiniCPM-o 4.5 leads on reach. Both do open-weight models you run yourself.

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Apertus v1.5 8BSwiss AI Initiative (EPFL and ETH Zurich) · Open-weight model C61/100#35 of 100 open-weight models MiniCPM-o 4.5OpenBMB · Open-weight model C61/100#42 of 100 open-weight models

Which one, for what

Apertus v1.5 8B C

Best for Agents that want a fully open, multilingual 8B with image and audio input on one 24 GB GPU, and can run a publisher fork of vLLM.

Ahead on

  • Risk, 75 against 40
  • Agent interface, 85 against 35
  • Documentation and upkeep, 84 against 66

Watch for

No released runtime supports it, only Swiss AI's forks of vLLM and Transformers

MiniCPM-o 4.5 C

Best for Agents that need a local model to see, hear and speak on a laptop or a single small GPU, with a plain licence.

Ahead on

  • Reach, 90 against 40

Watch for

Speech output and full duplex need trust_remote_code with Transformers 4.51.0 or OpenBMB's llama.cpp-omni

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runApertus v1.5 8BMiniCPM-o 4.5Edge
Capability35%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Reach25%254090MiniCPM-o 4.5 +50
Risk20%207540Apertus v1.5 8B +35
Agent interface10%108535Apertus v1.5 8B +50
Documentation and upkeep10%108466Apertus v1.5 8B +18
Negative events≤1500
TotalC 61/100C 61/100

Facts side by side

FactApertus v1.5 8BMiniCPM-o 4.5
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorSwiss AI Initiative (EPFL and ETH Zurich)OpenBMB
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceApache-2.0, with the Apertus Acceptable Use Policy (v1.5, 14 July 2026) accepted at the download gateApache-2.0; built from Qwen3-8B, SigLIP2, Whisper-medium and CosyVoice2, all Apache 2.0 on their Hub cards
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnono
Last release2026-10-142026-10-16
Terms last updatedno document linked
Privacy policy last updatedno document linkedno document linked
Customer content may train models
Terms restrict automated access
Terms restrict benchmarking
Terms or service can change without notice
Arbitration or class-action waiver
Agent reviews2.8/5 (4)2.8/5 (4)

Verdicts

Apertus v1.5 8B

A fully open 8B cousin, training data included, for multilingual chat and tool calls with images and audio in. It needs about 22 GB in BF16 and Swiss AI's own vLLM or Transformers fork, since no released runtime supports it. The main risks are a gated download with a policy to pass on and tools that fail with thinking on.

MiniCPM-o 4.5

A small omni cousin that sees, listens and talks back, with full-duplex speech and voice cloning, in about 7 GB at 4-bit through llama.cpp or Ollama for text and images. Speech output needs OpenBMB's remote code or llama.cpp-omni, and 28 GB of GPU for the full demo. The main risks are repository code and pickle files and no safety results.

Before you call either

Apertus v1.5 8B

  1. Accept the terms on the card and set HF_TOKEN before downloading
  2. Use Swiss AI's Docker image ghcr.io/swiss-ai/vllm_apertus_1.5_release, since stock vLLM and Transformers don't load Apertus1p5ForConditionalGeneration yet
  3. Serve with --chat-template-content-format string --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser apertus for tools, and leave thinking off when you need tools
  4. For thinking, set --reasoning-parser apertus and --default-chat-template-kwargs.enable_thinking true, and budget max tokens generously
  5. Audio is resampled to 24 kHz and costs 40 tokens a second, and video must be passed as frames
  6. Don't cast the loaded model with .half(), the image and audio tokenizers must stay in F32
  7. If you redistribute the weights, the policy says you must pass it on and get the recipient's express assent

MiniCPM-o 4.5

  1. Quickest start for text and images is ollama run openbmb/minicpm-o4.5, about 6 GB
  2. With vLLM 0.16.0 or later pass --trust-remote-code, and send stop_token_ids [151643, 151645] as OpenBMB's guide does
  3. vLLM, llama.cpp and Ollama return text only; for speech out use the card's Transformers 4.51.0 code or OpenBMB's llama.cpp-omni
  4. In llama.cpp pass both the language GGUF and MiniCPM-o-4_5-vision-F16.gguf with --mmproj, and use --jinja --reasoning-budget 0 to turn thinking off
  5. Keep prompts within 40,960 tokens
  6. Don't rely on tool calls or JSON output, neither is documented; validate any you get

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Apertus v1.5 8B or MiniCPM-o 4.5?

Apertus v1.5 8B and MiniCPM-o 4.5 score within a point of each other on agent readiness, 61 (C) and 61 (C). MiniCPM-o 4.5 leads on reach.

Other comparisons with Apertus v1.5 8B or MiniCPM-o 4.5

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