Ornith 1.5 35B A3B

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.

vLLM

vllm serve ornith-ai/Ornith-1.5-35B-A3B \
    --served-model-name Ornith-1.5-35B-A3B \
    --host 0.0.0.0 --port 8000 \
    --tensor-parallel-size 2 \
    --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-1.5-35B-A3B \
    --served-model-name Ornith-1.5-35B-A3B \
    --host 0.0.0.0 --port 8000 \
    --tp 2 \
    --context-length 262144 \
    --mem-fraction-static 0.85 \
    --tool-call-parser qwen3_coder \
    --reasoning-parser qwen3

For Long-Context

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:

  {
      "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-1.5-35B-A3B ... --hf-overrides '{"rope_scaling": {"rope_type": "yarn", "factor": 4.0, "original_max_position_embeddings": 262144}}' --max-model-len 1000000

  SGLang:

  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-1.5-35B-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

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)

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

llama-server -hf ornith-ai/Ornith-1.5-35B-A3B-GGUF --port 8000 -c 262144

llama.cpp

llama-server -hf ornith-ai/Ornith-1.5-35B-A3B-GGUF --port 8000 -c 262144

Hermes Agent

export OPENAI_BASE_URL="http://localhost:8000/v1"
export OPENAI_API_KEY="EMPTY"
export MODEL="ornith-ai/Ornith-1.5-35B-A3B"

OpenClaw

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

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.

OpenCode

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}
}