Apertus v1.5 8B vs Qwopus3.8-27B-Flash-V2

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.

Qwopus3.8-27B-Flash-V2

A Qwen3.8-27B cousin tuned to think less per turn in long agent loops, with an MTP head for speculative decoding in llama.cpp. It fits 24 GB with Jackrong's 4-bit GGUF. The risks are one person's experimental release with no safety work, training traces taken from Claude and GPT, and a tool format that differs from Qwen's.

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

Qwopus3.8-27B-Flash-V2

1. Quickest start is llama-server -hf Jackrong/Qwopus3.8-27B-Flash-V2-GGUF:Q4_K_M --jinja, about 17 GB, and add mmproj-F32.gguf for images
2. The card's tests used Q5_K_M with the bundled MTP head and --spec-type draft-mtp in llama.cpp
3. The template asks for tool calls as JSON inside tool_call tags, so use a Hermes-style parser (vLLM's hermes), not Qwen3.8's qwen3_coder
4. For coding the card recommends enable_thinking true, reasoning_effort xhigh and temperature 0.3, which you must pass yourself, since generation_config.json says 1.0
5. reasoning_effort takes xhigh (default), medium or low, and any other value makes the template raise an error
6. Earlier reasoning stays in the context unless preserve_thinking is false
7. Cap max_tokens, since a report says it loops more than V1