Ornith-1.5

Trends

• Chinese labs take the lead in open-weight models

Items

1. Aug 19

   Ornith AI's Ornith-1.5 open-weight family

   An MIT-licensed family (397B and 35B-A3B MoEs plus a 9B dense model, 256K context) trained with a self-improvement loop and claimed to beat Claude Opus 4.8 on four agentic-coding benchmarks; all figures are vendor-reported, with independent evaluation pending.