Swiss AI publishes Apertus 1.5 release notes for its July open models

The Swiss AI team behind Apertus published release notes for Apertus 1.5 on Oct 15. It's not a new model: the 8B and 70B weights came out on Hugging Face on July 24 under Apache 2.0 (downloading requires accepting a usage policy and sharing contact details). Version 1.5 extends Apertus 1.0 with image and audio understanding (text output only, and audio is experimental), an optional thinking mode, a 262,144-token context window, and better instruction-following and tool use. The notes and technical report document data, recipes and evaluations. Intermediate checkpoints and datasets are also published. Benchmark results are the team's own. (Hugging Face)
How you’d use it: If you want an Apache-2.0 multimodal open model with published training recipes, try Apertus 1.5 8B or 70B on Hugging Face. Accept the usage policy and share contact details to download. Read the release notes and arXiv:2610.15542 for data, checkpoints and how they evaluate. Treat benchmark claims as the team's own.