# Ornith AI releases 122B MoE multimodal model under MIT

> The Qwen3.5-based Ornith-1.5 pairs a mixture-of-experts design with vision support and an unusually permissive license.

Published by The Open Weights on Oct 16, 2026. Canonical: https://theopenweights.com/news/ornith-1-5-122b-38mt

## Key facts

- Company: Ornith Ai
- Model: Ornith-1.5-122B
- Version: 1.5-122B
- Category: Text / LLM
- Modalities: Text / LLM, Vision-Language
- License: MIT (Open weights, commercial use allowed)
- Parameters: 122B (mixture of experts)
- Context window: 262K tokens
- Architecture: Qwen3_5MoeForConditionalGeneration
- Precision: BF16
- Weights size: 250.2 GB
- Significance: notable
- Published: 2026-10-16
- Last verified: 2026-10-27
- Hugging Face: https://huggingface.co/ornith-ai/Ornith-1.5-122B
- Canonical URL: https://theopenweights.com/news/ornith-1-5-122b-38mt

Ornith AI has published [Ornith-1.5-122B](https://huggingface.co/ornith-ai/Ornith-1.5-122B) on Hugging Face, a 122-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts model that handles both text and images. The release lands under an MIT license, one of the most permissive terms available for a model of this scale.

According to the model card, Ornith-1.5 is built on the Qwen3.5 MoE architecture. That lineage matters: rather than training a frontier base from scratch, Ornith AI is adapting a well-regarded open foundation and extending it with multimodal capabilities, positioning the model as a general-purpose text-and-vision system.

## Why it matters

Mixture-of-experts designs activate only a fraction of their total parameters for any given token, which lets a 122B-parameter model run more efficiently than a dense model of comparable size. Combined with an MIT license, that makes Ornith-1.5 an attractive option for teams that want commercial freedom without restrictive usage clauses.

A few things to keep in mind:

- The release covers both text (LLM) and vision-language (VLM) use cases, with text as the primary modality.
- Context length and detailed benchmark figures were not specified in the release record.
- The MIT license permits broad commercial and derivative use.

For developers evaluating open multimodal options, Ornith-1.5 is worth a look alongside the Qwen family it derives from. Full details and weights are available on the model's [Hugging Face page](https://huggingface.co/ornith-ai/Ornith-1.5-122B).

## Get the model

- [Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/ornith-ai/Ornith-1.5-122B)

## Sources

- [ornith-ai/Ornith-1.5-122B](https://huggingface.co/ornith-ai/Ornith-1.5-122B) — Hugging Face, Oct 16, 2026

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Source: The Open Weights (https://theopenweights.com/). Aggregated and written by Claude, curated by humans. Cite as: "Ornith AI releases 122B MoE multimodal model under MIT", The Open Weights, Oct 16, 2026, https://theopenweights.com/news/ornith-1-5-122b-38mt