Apertus 1.5 adds image and audio input, thinking mode and 262k context to 8B and 70B models
Overview
Project Apertus releases Apertus 1.5, an update to its 8B and 70B models that adds image and audio input alongside text, an optional thinking mode, and a 262,144-token context window, four times the size of Apertus 1.0, according to the project's Hugging Face blog.
The updated weights were released on Hugging Face on July 24, 2026 under an Apache 2.0 license. Audio input is experimental, the source says. The blog says the models still trail frontier open-weight models, while the 8B model outperforms similarly sized open-weight models on instruction-following and multilingual tasks.
Written by AI from the articles below · updated Oct 15, 9:56 AM ET
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- Hugging Face BlogOfficialPickApertus 1.5 adds image and audio input and a 262k context window
AIApertus 1.5 extends the 8B and 70B Apertus 1.0 models with image and audio understanding, an optional thinking mode, and a context window of 262,144 tokens, four times the previous size. The updated 8B and 70B weights were released on Hugging Face on July 24, 2026 under an Apache 2.0 license. The source says the models still trail frontier open-weight models, with the 8B model outperforming similarly sized open-weight models on instruction-following and multilingual tasks.
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