Granite Switch 4.1 vs Drex 1.5

Granite Switch 4.1

One self-hosted Apache 2.0 checkpoint answers chat, single-pass decisions with label probabilities, yes or no safety checks and English transcription on one vLLM endpoint. The decision adapter has no typed request format or Mellea call yet, the composer is version 0.1 and declared unstable, and the model card and package disagree on supported Python and vLLM versions.

Drex 1.5

The hosted endpoint has a public OpenAPI document, published limits and pinned model versions, at $0.05 per million input tokens with no output charge. The #1 under 10B claim rests on Nace's own run, since Drex is absent from both public boards. Weights carry Open RAIL-M, which requires a commercial licence above $1 million in revenue or funding.

Granite Switch 4.1

1. Pass chat_template_kwargs: {"adapter_name": "decision"} or "guardian-core". Without it the request is ordinary chat on the base model
2. For a decision, send the state and the ### DECISION question as two user turns, request logprob_token_ids for the option labels, and set max_completion_tokens to 1
3. Use single-token option labels. Split more than 128 labels into chunks with the identical prompt and apply one softmax over all returned logprobs
4. Parse guardian-core answers as JSON, {"score": "yes"} or {"score": "no"}, where yes means the criterion is met
5. Add authentication before exposing the vLLM server. Neither vLLM nor the checkpoint requires a key by default

Drex 1.5

1. Call https://console.nace.ai/v1/systemone with Authorization: Bearer nace_sk_..., and pin model drex-v1.5 rather than drex-latest in production.
2. Stop on 402 insufficient_credit or 402 payment_required until credit is topped up or the unpaid invoice is paid.
3. Retry 429 and 529 after retry-after-ms. On a 422 for an unknown model, use one of the ids the error message lists.
4. Keep state below 131,072 tokens and the body below 1,048,576 bytes, and send at most 512 questions per request.
5. Keep the key on a server. A key in browser code is exposed, and the /v1 routes send no Access-Control-Allow-Origin header.
6. Check usage.input_tokens and the usage CSV after retries, since /v1/systemone documents no idempotency key.