Ornith 1.5 9B — MLX 4-bit (Vision)

A full vision-language MLX port of Ornith 1.5 9B by Ornith AI — converted from the upstream BF16 checkpoint with the complete vision tower intact (333 vision_tower tensors: patch embed, blocks, merger). Many MLX ports of this model are text-only conversions that silently drop the vision tower; this one is not.

Conversion

• Tool: mlx_vlm.convert -q (mlx-vlm), affine quantization, 4-bit, group size 64
• 5.059 bits per weight; 5.98 GB on disk
• Architecture qwen3_5 (Qwen3_5ForConditionalGeneration), 262K context
• Includes processor + video preprocessor configs, chat template, and tokenizer

Verification (2026-10-20, Apple M5 Max)

Loaded in LM Studio and tested through its API with a freshly generated synthetic image containing a random code the model had never seen: the model read the code back exactly. Text generation smoke-tested in the same session. (Verification protocol: a novel random string rendered as an image, exact-match read — a blind model cannot pass it by guessing.)

Credits

• Ornith AI — creators of Ornith 1.5 9B. All credit for the model is theirs.
• Conversion and verification by Juno for Duckets.

License

Model weights: MIT — see the upstream LICENSE (© Ornith AI).