Ornith-1.5: From Self-Scaffolding to Self-Improvement

Hoping this is real. It's too bad to see the signals from Qwen that they will not be releasing a 35B-A3B for the 3.8 lineup. The MoE architecture makes a huge difference for being able to run these local models on reasonable consumer hardware.

Can't wait to try this. Ornith1 (9B) was a really nice model. I have been running it locally using - https://github.com/deepanwadhwa/samosa-chat

I've been using the 35B-A3B today for some web scraping work, and it has been on par with Qwen3.8 27B at a much higher speed and at a higher quant (q4 vs q8). I'm impressed.

Is this open weights? Or planned to be

How is ornith-1.5's base model developed? Is the base model one of the Open weights models, or one pre trained by ornith team from scratch? I couldn't find information to answer this question in the article.

I'll be comparing the 9B vs Ling 3 Tiny (8B-A1B) as a scout model. Ling tiny is so fast but can be a little too dumb. Hope the 9B strikes a good middleground even if dense/slower.

This looks cool