Apertus 1.5 adds image and audio skills
Hugging Face: Apertus 1.5 Release Notes
The update reveals how developers are addressing limitations in reasoning and multimodal capabilities that affect real-world deployment.
Get smart on it
Apertus 1.5 is an updated version of an open-source AI model available in two sizes that adds the ability to understand images and audio alongside text, includes an optional "thinking mode" for reasoning tasks, expands its context window to four times the previous length, and improves instruction-following and tool use. The models were trained through multiple stages including continued pretraining on trillions of tokens of text and multimodal data, followed by five post-training stages designed to improve specific capabilities and align the model with stated values. The release matters because it demonstrates how open-source AI development can extend model capabilities across multiple modalities while maintaining transparency through open weights, open data, and detailed documentation of training and evaluation methods. The models are made available under a permissive license and include comprehensive evaluation results across text, image, audio, and reasoning tasks to allow for reproducible benchmarking.
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