Ornith-1.5-9B
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 9B
This model card documents Ornith-1.5-9B, the most lightweight member of the Ornith-1.5 family — a 9B dense model designed for efficient single-GPU deployment, and edge-deployable on mobile devices via its quantized Ornith-1.5-9B-Mobile variant.
Benchmarks
Quickstart
Serving Ornith-1.5-9B
Ornith-1.5-9B is a dense ~9B model (≈19 GB in bf16), so it serves on a single 80GB GPU. The recipes below stand up an OpenAI-compatible server; add --tensor-parallel-size / --tp if you want to shard across more GPUs.
- vLLM
vllm serve ornith-ai/Ornith-1.5-9B --served-model-name Ornith-1.5-9B --host 0.0.0.0 --port 8000 --max-model-len 262144 --gpu-memory-utilization 0.90 --enable-prefix-caching --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser qwen3_xml --reasoning-parser qwen3 --trust-remote-code
- SGLang
python -m sglang.launch_server --model-path ornith-ai/Ornith-1.5-9B --served-model-name Ornith-1.5-9B --host 0.0.0.0 --port 8000 --context-length 262144 --mem-fraction-static 0.85 --tool-call-parser qwen3_coder --reasoning-parser qwen3
For Long-Context
Ornith-1.5-9B 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 arope_scalingblock to the model configuration:{ "rope_scaling": { "rope_type": "yarn", "factor": 4.0, "original_max_position_embeddings": 262144 } } -
Override at launch time. Leave the checkpoint untouched and extend the serve commands above with the equivalent flags.
vLLM:
VLLM_ALLOW_LONG_MAX_MODEL_LEN=1 vllm serve ornith-ai/Ornith-1.5-9B ... --hf-overrides '{"rope_scaling": {"rope_type": "yarn", "factor": 4.0, "original_max_position_embeddings": 262144}}' --max-model-len 1000000SGLang:
SGLANG_ALLOW_OVERWRITE_LONGER_CONTEXT_LEN=1 python -m sglang.launch_server ... --json-model-override-args '{"rope_scaling": {"rope_type": "yarn", "factor": 4.0, "original_max_position_embeddings": 262144}}' --context-length 1000000
Using Ornith-1.5-9B 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-1.5-9B",
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-1.5-9B 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-1.5-9B",
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-1.5-9B exposes an OpenAI-compatible endpoint with tool calling, it works out of the box with standard agent frameworks.
Examples of using Ornith with agents:
Ollama
ollama run ornith-1.5:9b
Atomic.chat
# Both runtimes load a GGUF build of Ornith (publish one at ornith-ai/Ornith-1.5-9B-GGUF).
# llama.cpp — serve an OpenAI-compatible API on port 8000.
llama-server -hf hf.co/ornith-ai/Ornith-1.5-9B-GGUF --port 8000 -c 262144
llama.cpp
# Both runtimes load a GGUF build of Ornith (publish one at ornith-ai/Ornith-1.5-9B-GGUF).
# llama.cpp — serve an OpenAI-compatible API on port 8000.
llama-server -hf hf.co/ornith-ai/Ornith-1.5-9B-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-1.5-9B"
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-1.5-9B"
Unsloth Studio
pip install unsloth
# Load Ornith for fast local inference or fine-tuning (Python):
# from unsloth import FastLanguageModel
# model, tokenizer = FastLanguageModel.from_pretrained(
# "unsloth/Ornith-1.5-9B-GGUF",
# max_seq_length=262144,
# load_in_4bit=True,
# )
Coding CLIs
Ornith-1.5-9B is optimized for terminal-based coding agents. Point any OpenAI-compatible coding CLI at your Ornith-1.5-9B endpoint (set OPENAI_BASE_URL and OPENAI_API_KEY) to understand large codebases, automate tedious work, and ship faster.
OpenCode
# Register your local Ornith endpoint as a provider in ~/.config/opencode/opencode.json:
#
# {
# "$schema": "https://opencode.ai/config.json",
# "provider": {
# "ornith": {
# "npm": "@ai-sdk/openai-compatible",
# "name": "Ornith (local)",
# "options": { "baseURL": "http://localhost:8000/v1", "apiKey": "EMPTY" },
# "models": { "ornith-ai/Ornith-1.5-9B": { "name": "Ornith-1.5-9B" } }
# }
# }
# }
opencode
Citation
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}
}