Head to head · Open-weight models you run yourself · October 2026 research run
Apertus v1.5 8B vs Ornith-1.5-122B
Apertus v1.5 8B and Ornith-1.5-122B score within a point of each other on agent readiness, 61 (C) and 61 (C). Ornith-1.5-122B leads on reach. Both do open-weight models you run yourself.
Best open-weight models you download and run yourself for AI agents · All 6359 open weights comparisons
Which one, for what
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 50
- Documentation and upkeep, 84 against 36
Watch for
No released runtime supports it, only Swiss AI's forks of vLLM and Transformers
Best for Local coding and terminal agents on a 128 GB unified-memory machine or a 96 GB GPU setup, where a clear licence file and an answering publisher aren't required
Ahead on
- Reach, 75 against 40
Watch for
No LICENSE file though the card links one, and no notice for the Apache 2.0 Qwen3.5 and Gemma 4 work it builds on
Why the edge
Each category where one leads by five points or more, with the reason behind each side's score from its assessment. The numbers are in the table below; this is what they stand for.
Documentation and upkeep Apertus v1.5 8B +48
Apertus v1.5 8B 84
Model card 14 of 20, languages and a knowledge cut-off are missing. Training data 20, every dataset is public and listed with versions, licences and counts. Last change 20, the card changed on 14 October 2026, 20 days before 3 November, and Swiss AI added its own evaluation-results files on 26 October and 3 November. Responsiveness 20, Swiss AI answered all three questions, unchanged on 3 November 2026. Version policy 5, earlier models stay in their own repositories without a dated note. File health 5, the gated config couldn't be checked against the card, and the card and the policy disagree on the output filter.
Ornith-1.5-122B 36
Model card 11, it covers intended use, architecture, parameters and context but not limitations, languages or a knowledge cut-off. Training data 5, a description of the method with no data or cut-off. Last change 20, a folder upload to the MLX builds on 24 October 2026, 17 days ago. Responsiveness 0, Ornith answered none of the 5 questions and reports. Version policy 0, the MLX builds were uploaded a second time four days after the first with no note. File health 0, the card links a missing LICENSE, states hardware its own files don't fit and names a variant that doesn't exist, and the two chat templates differ. 11 + 5 + 20 + 0 + 0 + 0 = 36.
Reach Ornith-1.5-122B +35
Apertus v1.5 8B 40
Memory 25 of 30, the BF16 files are 18.4 GB, or 22.1 GB with a fifth added, which fits 24 GB. Runtimes 0, no released vLLM (to 0.33.0), SGLang (to 0.5.23), Transformers (to 5.22.1), llama.cpp, Ollama or LM Studio runs version 1.5 yet, only Swiss AI's forks. Builds 0, Swiss AI publishes no quantised build. Terms 10 of 15, Apache 2.0 with an acceptable use policy added at the gate. Download 5, a click-through that needs an account and your contact details. Hosted 0, no inference provider or publisher API was found, and Swiss AI's documentation page names none on 3 November 2026.
Ornith-1.5-122B 75
Memory 10, since Ornith's own MLX 4-bit build is 69.7 GB and needs about 83.6 GB with the fifth added, over 64 GB and inside the reference machine's 107.4 GB, as do its Q4_K_M GGUF, its NVFP4 build and Ollama's build. Runtimes 25, the most the line gives, from vLLM 0.33.0, SGLang 0.5.23, Transformers 5.22.2, llama.cpp's qwen35moe architecture, Ollama's library and LM Studio's catalogue for the qwen35moe architecture. Builds 15, Ornith publishes FP8, NVFP4, GGUF and MLX at several precisions. Terms 15, MIT as named in the card's metadata, with nothing added, read by its terms though the repository has no licence file. Download 10, nothing is gated. Hosted 0, Ornith runs no API and no inference provider serves it. 10 + 25 + 15 + 15 + 10 + 0 = 75.
Risk Apertus v1.5 8B +25
Apertus v1.5 8B 75
File safety 25, safetensors only and no code in the repository. Provenance 15, the files are in the swiss-ai organisation the report links, with a checksum on every file. Safety evaluation 10 of 20, published safety benchmarks run with Swiss AI's open harnesses and early access for three outside evaluators, but the manual evaluation is Swiss AI's own and can't be rerun. Agent guidance 10, the report says what the refusals cover, how far jailbreaks get and that capability limits are the main defence, with a personal-data filter to apply, but nothing on prompt injection for deployers. Licence risk 10, 5 off for the use policy. Security programme 5, ETH Zurich's disclosure policy, with no advisories found.
Ornith-1.5-122B 50
File safety 25, safetensors and GGUF only and no Python in any of Ornith's repositories for this size, so the card's --trust-remote-code flag loads nothing from the repository. Provenance 15, the files come from the ornith-ai organisation Ornith's blog links to, with a SHA-256 for every weight file. Safety evaluation 0 and agent guidance 0, nothing published on either. Licence risk 10, MIT carries no policy, threshold or changeable terms, but the card's licence link is broken. Security programme 0, no security.txt, disclosure policy or security contact.
Score by category
| Category | Weight this run | Apertus v1.5 8B | Ornith-1.5-122B | Edge |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Capability | 35%pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Reach | 25%25 | 40 | 75 | Ornith-1.5-122B +35 |
| Risk | 20%20 | 75 | 50 | Apertus v1.5 8B +25 |
| Agent interface | 10%10 | 85 | 85 | even |
| Documentation and upkeep | 10%10 | 84 | 36 | Apertus v1.5 8B +48 |
| Negative events | ≤15 | 0 | 0 | |
| Total | C 61/100 | C 61/100 |
Facts side by side
| Fact | Apertus v1.5 8B | Ornith-1.5-122B |
|---|---|---|
| Kind | Open-weight model | Open-weight model |
| Vendor | Swiss AI Initiative (EPFL and ETH Zurich) | Ornith |
| Hosted endpoint | no (local only) | no (local only) |
| Transports | ||
| Auth | None | None |
| Pricing | Free | Free |
| x402 | no | no |
| Licence | Apache-2.0, with the Apertus Acceptable Use Policy (v1.5, 14 July 2026) accepted at the download gate | MIT |
| Read-only variant documented | no | no |
| llms.txt | no | no |
| Last release | 2026-10-14 | 2026-10-24 |
| Terms last updated | not read yet | no document linked |
| Privacy policy last updated | no document linked | no document linked |
| Agent reviews | 2.8/5 (4) | none |
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.
Ornith-1.5-122B
The largest Ornith that fits a 128 GB machine, a coding and terminal-agent cousin on Qwen3.5-122B-A10B's architecture with XML tool calls and 262,144 tokens of context. Its 4-bit builds need 84 to 93 GB. The main risk is an absent publisher, with no licence file, safety results or replies, and a card that misstates the hardware.
Before you call either
Apertus v1.5 8B
- Accept the terms on the card and set HF_TOKEN before downloading
- 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
- Serve with
--chat-template-content-format string --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser apertusfor tools, and leave thinking off when you need tools - For thinking, set
--reasoning-parser apertusand--default-chat-template-kwargs.enable_thinking true, and budget max tokens generously - Audio is resampled to 24 kHz and costs 40 tokens a second, and video must be passed as frames
- Don't cast the loaded model with .half(), the image and audio tokenizers must stay in F32
- If you redistribute the weights, the policy says you must pass it on and get the recipient's express assent
Ornith-1.5-122B
- Start it with
ollama run ornith-1.5:122b-q4_K_M, orllama-server -hf ornith-ai/Ornith-1.5-122B-GGUF:Q4_K_M --jinja -c 262144 - Budget about 92 GB for the Q4_K_M GGUF with a working context, and less context if the machine has under 100 GB for the model
- In vLLM pass
--enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser qwen3_xml --reasoning-parser qwen3, and in SGLang--tool-call-parser qwen3_coder --reasoning-parser qwen3, so tool calls and reasoning come back parsed - Thinking is on by default. Send
chat_template_kwargswithenable_thinkingfalse for short tasks, a switch the card doesn't mention - Pin which template your runtime loads, since chat_template.jinja keeps earlier reasoning and the tokenizer_config.json template drops it
- Use temperature 0.6, top_p 0.95, top_k 20 for coding and temperature 1.0 for general tasks, as the card recommends
- Add mmproj-Ornith-1.5-122B-BF16.gguf (0.9 GB) for image input in llama.cpp, and validate JSON output yourself, since structured output isn't documented
Questions
Which is better for AI agents, Apertus v1.5 8B or Ornith-1.5-122B?
Apertus v1.5 8B and Ornith-1.5-122B score within a point of each other on agent readiness, 61 (C) and 61 (C). Ornith-1.5-122B leads on reach.
Other comparisons with Apertus v1.5 8B or Ornith-1.5-122B
- Agents-A1-4B vs Apertus v1.5 8B
- Agents-A1-4B vs Ornith-1.5-122B
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs Apodex-1.1-mini
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs Arete-27B
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs BigBang-v1
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs Carbon-X
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs Cola2
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs Cosmos-Reason2-2B
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs Darwin-36B-Opus
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs DeepSeek-V3.2
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs DeepSeek V4.1 Flash
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs Devstral Small 2
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs DiffusionGemma 26B A4B IT
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs EXAONE 4.5 33B
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs Gemma 4 12B IT
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs Gemma 4 26B A4B IT
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs Gemma 4 31B IT
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs Gemma 4 E2B IT
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs Gemma 4 E4B IT
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs GLM-4.5-Air
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs GLM-4.7-Flash
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs GLM-5.3
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs GLM-5.3-Flash
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs gpt-oss-120b
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs gpt-oss-20b
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs Granite 4.2 30B
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs Granite 4.2 3B
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs Granite 4.2 8B
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs Hy-Memory-30B-A3B
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs Hy3
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs Inkling
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs Inkling-Small
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs InternVL3.5-GPT-OSS-20B-A4B-Preview
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs Kimi K3
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs Kimi K3.1 Pro
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs Kolibri-1
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs Kronos
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs Laguna M.1
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs Laguna S 2.1
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs Laguna XS 2.1
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs LBS-27B
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs LFM2.5-2.6B
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs LFM3-1.7B
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs LFM3-Audio-2B
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs LFM3-Omni-2B
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs LFM3-VL-2B
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs Ling-3.0-tiny
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs Ling-3.1-flash-1019
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs LongCat-2.5
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs MiMo-V2.6-Flash-RL
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs MiniCPM-o 4.5
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs MiniCPM-V 4.7 1B
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs MiniCPM-V 4.7 35B-A3B
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs MiniCPM5-2B
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs MiniMax-M2.5
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs MiniMax-M2.7
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs MiniMax-M3.1-Flash
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs Mistral Large 4
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs Muse Glimmer 30B
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs Nanbeige4.2-3B
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs Nanbeige4.3-33B
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 4GB
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B A3B
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs Nemotron 3 Nano 30B A3B
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs Nemotron 3 Nano 4B
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs Nemotron 3 Nano Omni 30B A3B Reasoning
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs Nemotron 3 Ultra 550B A55B
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs North Mini Code 1.0
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs occamy-1.0
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs Olmo 3 7B Think
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs Ornith-1.5-35B-A3B
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs Ornith-1.5-397B
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs Ornith-1.5-9B
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs OTel-2.0-LLM-31B-IT
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs Qwen-AgentWorld-35B-A3B
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs Qwen3-4B-Instruct-2507
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs Qwen3.5-0.8B
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs Qwen3.5-122B-A10B
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs Qwen3.5-2B
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs Qwen3.5-397B-A17B
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs Qwen3.5-4B
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs Qwen3.5-9B
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs Qwen3.6-27B
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs Qwen3.6-35B-A3B
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs Qwen3.8-27B
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs Qwen3.8-Flash-Next
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs Qwen3-Coder-Next
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B-Instruct
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs Qwen3-VL-2B-Instruct
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B-Instruct
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs Qwen3-VL-32B-Instruct
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs Qwen3-VL-4B-Instruct
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs Qwopus3.8-27B-Flash-V2
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs Recursive Flint
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs Ripple-65B Preview
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs SenseNova-Loop-9B-Preview
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs SmolLM3-3B
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs Spark-X2.6-4B
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs Step 3.7 Flash
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs Swift 1.5 Qwen3.8-27B
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs Swift 1.5 Qwen3.8-Flash-Next
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs ThinkingCap (Qwen3.8 27B)
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs Baidu Unlimited-OCR-2
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs WeVisOne-VL-2B
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs WeVisOne-VL-4B
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs ZAYA1-8B
- Apodex-1.1-mini vs Ornith-1.5-122B
- Arete-27B vs Ornith-1.5-122B
- BigBang-v1 vs Ornith-1.5-122B
- Carbon-X vs Ornith-1.5-122B
- Cola2 vs Ornith-1.5-122B
- Cosmos-Reason2-2B vs Ornith-1.5-122B
- Darwin-36B-Opus vs Ornith-1.5-122B
- DeepSeek-V3.2 vs Ornith-1.5-122B
- DeepSeek V4.1 Flash vs Ornith-1.5-122B
- DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731 vs Ornith-1.5-122B
- Devstral Small 2 vs Ornith-1.5-122B
- DiffusionGemma 26B A4B IT vs Ornith-1.5-122B
- EXAONE 4.5 33B vs Ornith-1.5-122B
- Gemma 4 12B IT vs Ornith-1.5-122B
- Gemma 4 26B A4B IT vs Ornith-1.5-122B
- Gemma 4 31B IT vs Ornith-1.5-122B
- Gemma 4 E2B IT vs Ornith-1.5-122B
- Gemma 4 E4B IT vs Ornith-1.5-122B
- GLM-4.5-Air vs Ornith-1.5-122B
- GLM-4.7-Flash vs Ornith-1.5-122B
- GLM-5.3-Flash vs Ornith-1.5-122B
- GLM-5.3 vs Ornith-1.5-122B
- gpt-oss-120b vs Ornith-1.5-122B
- gpt-oss-20b vs Ornith-1.5-122B
- Granite 4.2 30B vs Ornith-1.5-122B
- Granite 4.2 3B vs Ornith-1.5-122B
- Granite 4.2 8B vs Ornith-1.5-122B
- Hy-Memory-30B-A3B vs Ornith-1.5-122B
- Hy3 vs Ornith-1.5-122B
- Inkling-Small vs Ornith-1.5-122B
- Inkling vs Ornith-1.5-122B
- InternVL3.5-GPT-OSS-20B-A4B-Preview vs Ornith-1.5-122B
- Kimi K3.1 Pro vs Ornith-1.5-122B
- Kimi K3 vs Ornith-1.5-122B
- Kolibri-1 vs Ornith-1.5-122B
- Kronos vs Ornith-1.5-122B
- Laguna M.1 vs Ornith-1.5-122B
- Laguna S 2.1 vs Ornith-1.5-122B
- Laguna XS 2.1 vs Ornith-1.5-122B
- LBS-27B vs Ornith-1.5-122B
- LFM2.5-2.6B vs Ornith-1.5-122B
- LFM3-1.7B vs Ornith-1.5-122B
- LFM3-Audio-2B vs Ornith-1.5-122B
- LFM3-Omni-2B vs Ornith-1.5-122B
- LFM3-VL-2B vs Ornith-1.5-122B
- Ling-3.0-tiny vs Ornith-1.5-122B
- Ling-3.1-flash-1019 vs Ornith-1.5-122B
- LongCat-2.5 vs Ornith-1.5-122B
- MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B vs Ornith-1.5-122B
- MiMo-V2.6-Flash-RL vs Ornith-1.5-122B
- MiniCPM-o 4.5 vs Ornith-1.5-122B
- MiniCPM-V 4.7 1B vs Ornith-1.5-122B
- MiniCPM-V 4.7 35B-A3B vs Ornith-1.5-122B
- MiniCPM5-2B vs Ornith-1.5-122B
- MiniMax-M2.5 vs Ornith-1.5-122B
- MiniMax-M2.7 vs Ornith-1.5-122B
- MiniMax-M3.1-Flash vs Ornith-1.5-122B
- Mistral Large 4 vs Ornith-1.5-122B
- Muse Glimmer 30B vs Ornith-1.5-122B
- Nanbeige4.2-3B vs Ornith-1.5-122B
- Nanbeige4.3-33B vs Ornith-1.5-122B
- NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 4GB vs Ornith-1.5-122B
- Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B A3B vs Ornith-1.5-122B
- Nemotron 3 Nano 30B A3B vs Ornith-1.5-122B
- Nemotron 3 Nano 4B vs Ornith-1.5-122B
- Nemotron 3 Nano Omni 30B A3B Reasoning vs Ornith-1.5-122B
- Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B vs Ornith-1.5-122B
- Nemotron 3 Ultra 550B A55B vs Ornith-1.5-122B
- North Mini Code 1.0 vs Ornith-1.5-122B
- occamy-1.0 vs Ornith-1.5-122B
- Olmo 3 7B Think vs Ornith-1.5-122B
- Ornith-1.5-122B vs Ornith-1.5-35B-A3B
- Ornith-1.5-122B vs Ornith-1.5-397B
- Ornith-1.5-122B vs Ornith-1.5-9B
- Ornith-1.5-122B vs OTel-2.0-LLM-31B-IT
- Ornith-1.5-122B vs Qwen-AgentWorld-35B-A3B
- Ornith-1.5-122B vs Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507
- Ornith-1.5-122B vs Qwen3-4B-Instruct-2507
- Ornith-1.5-122B vs Qwen3.5-0.8B
- Ornith-1.5-122B vs Qwen3.5-122B-A10B
- Ornith-1.5-122B vs Qwen3.5-2B
- Ornith-1.5-122B vs Qwen3.5-397B-A17B
- Ornith-1.5-122B vs Qwen3.5-4B
- Ornith-1.5-122B vs Qwen3.5-9B
- Ornith-1.5-122B vs Qwen3.6-27B
- Ornith-1.5-122B vs Qwen3.6-35B-A3B
- Ornith-1.5-122B vs Qwen3.8-27B
- Ornith-1.5-122B vs Qwen3.8-Flash-Next
- Ornith-1.5-122B vs Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct
- Ornith-1.5-122B vs Qwen3-Coder-Next
- Ornith-1.5-122B vs Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B-Instruct
- Ornith-1.5-122B vs Qwen3-VL-2B-Instruct
- Ornith-1.5-122B vs Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B-Instruct
- Ornith-1.5-122B vs Qwen3-VL-32B-Instruct
- Ornith-1.5-122B vs Qwen3-VL-4B-Instruct
- Ornith-1.5-122B vs Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct
- Ornith-1.5-122B vs Qwopus3.8-27B-Flash-V2
- Ornith-1.5-122B vs Recursive Flint
- Ornith-1.5-122B vs Ripple-65B Preview
- Ornith-1.5-122B vs SenseNova-Loop-9B-Preview
- Ornith-1.5-122B vs SmolLM3-3B
- Ornith-1.5-122B vs Spark-X2.6-4B
- Ornith-1.5-122B vs Step 3.7 Flash
- Ornith-1.5-122B vs Swift 1.5 Qwen3.8-27B
- Ornith-1.5-122B vs Swift 1.5 Qwen3.8-Flash-Next
- Ornith-1.5-122B vs ThinkingCap (Qwen3.8 27B)
- Ornith-1.5-122B vs Baidu Unlimited-OCR-2
- Ornith-1.5-122B vs WeVisOne-VL-2B
- Ornith-1.5-122B vs WeVisOne-VL-4B
- Ornith-1.5-122B vs ZAYA1-8B
Machine-readable
- This page as Markdown
/compare/apertus-v1-5-8b-vs-ornith-1-5-122b.md· slim.min.md· JSON.json(or sendAccept: text/markdown) - Each listing in full
/api/v1/tools/apertus-v1-5-8b.json·/api/v1/tools/ornith-1-5-122b.json - From a terminal
anchor compare apertus-v1-5-8b ornith-1-5-122b(the CLI) - Over MCP
compare_tools {"a": "apertus-v1-5-8b", "b": "ornith-1-5-122b"}at/mcp, no key