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

BigBang-v1 vs Ornith-1.5-9B

Ornith-1.5-9B scores 61 (C) on agent readiness against BigBang-v1's 54.4 (C), and leads in 2 of 4 scored categories. BigBang-v1 leads on risk and documentation and upkeep. Both do open-weight models you run yourself.

Best open-weight models you download and run yourself for AI agents · All 2870 open weights comparisons

Which one, for what

BigBang-v1 C

Best for Agents with 96 GB or more that want an Apache 2.0 mixture-of-experts model tuned for research, search and coding, and can do without publisher support.

Ahead on

  • Risk, 55 against 50
  • Documentation and upkeep, 46 against 31

Watch for

BF16 is the only build from the publisher, needing about 86 GB

Ornith-1.5-9B C

Best for Local coding and terminal agents on a laptop or a single consumer GPU, where a clear licence file and an answering publisher aren't required

Ahead on

  • Reach, 95 against 55
  • Agent interface, 85 against 60

Watch for

No LICENSE file though the card links one, and no notice for the Qwen3.5 and Gemma 4 work it builds on

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runBigBang-v1Ornith-1.5-9BEdge
Capability35%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Reach25%255595Ornith-1.5-9B +40
Risk20%205550BigBang-v1 +5
Agent interface10%106085Ornith-1.5-9B +25
Documentation and upkeep10%104631BigBang-v1 +15
Negative events≤1500
TotalC 54.4/100C 61/100

Facts side by side

FactBigBang-v1Ornith-1.5-9B
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorThe Endless Frontier (endless-frontier)Ornith
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceApache-2.0MIT
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnono
Last release2026-08-062026-08-23
Terms last updatedno document linkedno 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 reviews2.3/5 (4)2.3/5 (4)

Verdicts

BigBang-v1

A Qwen3.6-35B-A3B fine-tuned on synthetic research problems, under plain Apache 2.0, for search, science and coding work. The publisher ships BF16 only, about 86 GB to run, and has no report, safety results or replies to questions, so smaller builds and support come from others.

Ornith-1.5-9B

A small coding and terminal-agent cousin with thinking on by default, XML tool calls that vLLM and SGLang parse, and 262,144 tokens of context. Ornith's own 4-bit builds run in under 8 GB in most local runtimes. The main risk is an absent publisher, with no licence file, no safety results, files replaced without a note and no replies.

Before you call either

BigBang-v1

  1. On the reference machine use vllm serve endless-frontier/BigBang-v1 --max-model-len 131072 --reasoning-parser qwen3 --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser qwen3_coder
  2. The card says to keep at least 128K of context so its thinking isn't cut short
  3. Thinking control isn't documented, try the base template's enable_thinking false in chat_template_kwargs and check the output
  4. For a smaller build you'll need someone else's quantisation, the publisher has none
  5. Validate JSON output yourself or use the runtime's guided decoding

Ornith-1.5-9B

  1. Start it with ollama run ornith-1.5:9b, or llama-server -hf ornith-ai/Ornith-1.5-9B-GGUF with the Q4_K_M file
  2. 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
  3. Thinking is on by default. Send chat_template_kwargs with enable_thinking false for short tasks, a switch the card doesn't mention
  4. Pin which template your runtime loads, since chat_template.jinja keeps earlier reasoning and the tokenizer_config.json template drops it
  5. Use temperature 0.6, top_p 0.95, top_k 20 for coding and temperature 1.0 with presence_penalty 1.5 for general tasks, per the card
  6. Pin a revision when you download, since Ornith has replaced files in place, and add mmproj-Ornith-1.5-9B-BF16.gguf (0.9 GB) for image input in llama.cpp
  7. Validate JSON output yourself, since structured output isn't documented

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, BigBang-v1 or Ornith-1.5-9B?

Ornith-1.5-9B scores 61 (C) on agent readiness against BigBang-v1's 54.4 (C), and leads in 2 of 4 scored categories. BigBang-v1 leads on risk and documentation and upkeep.

Other comparisons with BigBang-v1 or Ornith-1.5-9B

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