Chirp Chirp! 🐦 We are introducing Ornith-1.5, a major step toward building foundation models through end-to-end self-improvement.
Ornith-1.5 extends Ornith-1.0 (which was developed on top of Qwen3.5 and Gemma4 with additional continued pretraining, mid-training, and post-training) by expanding the self-improvement loop from scaffold and rollout optimization to jointly optimizing task generation, scaffold construction, and solution rollouts. Rather than relying on a fixed set of human-curated tasks and manually designed harnesses, Ornith-1.5 continuously generates new training tasks, discovers effective strategies for solving them, and improves the policy through reinforcement learning. For more details on the task, harness, and rollout reward design, please refer to our blog.
Ornith 1.5 35B-A3B
This model card documents Ornith-1.5-35B-A3B, the mid-size mixture-of-experts member of the Ornith-1.5 family. It activates only ~3B parameters per token, yet significantly outperforms its similar-sized peer Qwen 3.6-35B across all coding and agentic benchmarks, and outperforms dense models such as Gemma 4-31B and Muse Glimmer-30B by wide margins on agentic coding.
Benchmarks
Quickstart
Serving Ornith-1.5-35B-A3B
Ornith-1.5-35B-A3B is a ~35B mixture-of-experts model with ~3B activated parameters per token (≈70 GB in bf16). The recipes below stand up an OpenAI-compatible server on 2× 80GB GPUs to leave headroom for the 256K context; adjust --tensor-parallel-size / --tp to match your hardware.
Ornith-1.5-35B-A3B handles context windows of up to 262,144 tokens. When a task's combined input and output must go beyond this limit, we suggest extending the effective window with RoPE scaling — YaRN is the technique we validate against, and it is already built into both vLLM and SGLang. With a scaling factor of 4.0, the usable window grows to roughly 1M tokens.
You can turn YaRN on in either of two ways:
Edit the checkpoint's config.json. Add a rope_scaling block to the model configuration:
Using Ornith-1.5-35B-A3B via the Chat Completions API
Once a vLLM or SGLang server is running, talk to it with any OpenAI-compatible client.
Basic Usage
from openai import OpenAI
client = OpenAI(
base_url="http://localhost:8000/v1",
api_key="EMPTY", # any non-empty string works for a local server
)
response = client.chat.completions.create(
model="Ornith-1.5-35B-A3B",
messages=[
{"role": "user", "content": "Write a one-line Python lambda that squares a number."}
],
temperature=0.6,
top_p=0.95,
max_tokens=1024,
)
message = response.choices[0].message
# reasoning_content holds the <think> trace; content holds the final answer.
print("reasoning:", getattr(message, "reasoning_content", None))
print("answer:", message.content)
You can also stream tokens, or hand the model tools — Ornith-1.5-35B-A3B emits well-formed function calls that the server parses into the standard tool_calls field:
tools = [
{
"type": "function",
"function": {
"name": "get_weather",
"description": "Get the current weather for a city",
"parameters": {
"type": "object",
"properties": {"city": {"type": "string"}},
"required": ["city"],
},
},
}
]
response = client.chat.completions.create(
model="Ornith-1.5-35B-A3B",
messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "What is the weather in Paris right now?"}],
tools=tools,
tool_choice="auto",
temperature=0.6,
max_tokens=2048,
)
tool_call = response.choices[0].message.tool_calls[0]
print(tool_call.function.name, tool_call.function.arguments)
# -> get_weather {"city": "Paris"}
You can point any OpenAI-compatible SDK (Python, Node.js, etc.) or curl at the same /v1/chat/completions endpoint.
Agentic Usage
Ornith-1.5-35B-A3B excels in tool-calling and agentic coding. It exposes an OpenAI-compatible endpoint with tool calling and works out of the box with standard agent frameworks.
Examples of using Ornith with agents:
Ollama
ollama run hf.co/ornith-ai/Ornith-1.5-35B-A3B-GGUF
Atomic.chat
# Atomic.chat loads a GGUF build of Ornith (ornith-ai/Ornith-1.5-35B-A3B-GGUF)
# through llama.cpp's OpenAI-compatible API on port 8000.
llama-server -hf ornith-ai/Ornith-1.5-35B-A3B-GGUF --port 8000 -c 262144
llama.cpp
# llama.cpp — serve an OpenAI-compatible API on port 8000.
llama-server -hf ornith-ai/Ornith-1.5-35B-A3B-GGUF --port 8000 -c 262144
Hermes Agent
# Hermes talks to any OpenAI-compatible endpoint — point it at your Ornith server.
export OPENAI_BASE_URL="http://localhost:8000/v1"
export OPENAI_API_KEY="EMPTY"
export MODEL="ornith-ai/Ornith-1.5-35B-A3B"
OpenClaw
# OpenClaw talks to any OpenAI-compatible endpoint — point it at your Ornith server.
export OPENAI_BASE_URL="http://localhost:8000/v1"
export OPENAI_API_KEY="EMPTY"
export OPENAI_MODEL="ornith-ai/Ornith-1.5-35B-A3B"
Unsloth Studio
pip install unsloth
# Load Ornith for fast local inference or fine-tuning (Python):
# from unsloth import FastLanguageModel
# model, tokenizer = FastLanguageModel.from_pretrained(
# "ornith-ai/Ornith-1.5-35B-A3B",
# max_seq_length=262144,
# load_in_4bit=True,
# )
Coding CLIs
Ornith-1.5-35B-A3B is optimized for terminal-based coding agents. Point any OpenAI-compatible coding CLI at your Ornith-1.5-35B-A3B endpoint (set OPENAI_BASE_URL and OPENAI_API_KEY) to understand large codebases, automate tedious work, and ship faster.
If you find our work helpful, feel free to give us a cite.
@misc{ornith_1_5,
title = {{Ornith-1.5}: From Self-Scaffolding to Self-Improvement},
url = {https://ornith.ai/ornith_1_5.html},
author = {{Ornith Team}},
year = {2026}
}
