Granite Switch 4.1 vs RightNow System Zero

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.

RightNow System Zero

A well-documented decision API with an OpenAPI file, idempotent retries, a detailed error catalogue, streaming over WebSocket and published per-unit prices with USD 5 of starting credit. Standard context is 38,000 tokens; the 64k, 128k and 1M bands are held and video is a preview. The latency and benchmark figures are RightNow's own, and several of its pages disagree.

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

RightNow System Zero

1. Send audio only as inline 16,000 Hz WAV. The FLAC, MP3, OGG and MP4 audio named on the blog are refused with media_unsupported.
2. Keep state under 38,000 tokens. Long-context requests return 404 long_context_not_available, which never succeeds on retry.
3. Reuse the same Idempotency-Key and body on retries, and stop when error.retryable or x-should-retry is false.
4. Check every entry in answers even on HTTP 200, since one question can be refused while the others are answered.
5. Treat probabilities as uncalibrated while calibrated is false, and pin system-zero-2.0.0 when answers must not move with the alias.