An imatrix-calibrated, Unsloth-Dynamic-style GGUF ladder for Ornith-1.5-35B-A3B — the model's own weights and chat template, re-quantized with a per-tensor precision policy and a fresh importance matrix. The MTP (nextn) block is removed from every tier — Ornith-1.5 ships it untrained, so it could only add size. Why.

Not affiliated with Unsloth

This is an independent, best-effort community reproduction of Unsloth's Dynamic GGUF method — not an official Unsloth release, and not endorsed by or connected to Unsloth in any way. Unsloth had not published their own Ornith-1.5 quants at the time of writing and a lot of people wanted them, so we published these while we wait. If and when Unsloth ship an official build, use theirs. "Unsloth" is used here only to name the method these quants reproduce.

Method

Two ingredients, both applied to Ornith's own BF16:

Unsloth-Dynamic per-tensor policy. Instead of one bit-width for the whole model, each tensor gets a type chosen by sensitivity — more bits where they matter (embeddings, attention, early/late layers), fewer where they don't. We transfer the published per-tensor recipe from Unsloth's Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-GGUF (same qwen35moe architecture) tier-for-tier.
A fresh importance matrix. Computed on Ornith's own BF16 over an interleaved multilingual + code calibration corpus, so the quantizer knows which weights to protect for this model rather than inheriting someone else's statistics.

The chat template is Ornith's own, unchanged — no custom system prompt, so these behave exactly like the base model, just smaller.

Tiers

Tier	Approx size	Notes
`UD-Q2_K_XL`	~12 GB	16 GB VRAM, or 6 GB VRAM + partial offload
`UD-IQ3_XXS`	~13 GB	higher-quality 16 GB-VRAM pick (better than Q2 at similar size)
`UD-Q3_K_XL`	~16 GB
`UD-IQ4_XS`	~17 GB	full-context option for 24 GB VRAM (leaves the most room for context)
`UD-Q4_K_S`	~20 GB	24 GB VRAM friendly
`UD-Q4_K_XL`	~22 GB	recommended balance
`UD-Q5_K_XL`	~25 GB
`UD-Q6_K_XL`	~30 GB	near-lossless
`UD-Q8_K_XL`	~37 GB	reference

All tiers are published.

Download

bash

hf download peculiar-ragdoll/Unsloth-Ornith-1.5-35B-A3B \
  Unsloth-Ornith-1.5-35B-A3B-UD-Q4_K_XL.gguf --local-dir .

Then run with any llama.cpp-based stack (llama.cpp, LM Studio, Ollama, etc.).

Why no MTP

Ornith-1.5 carries an MTP (nextn) block and earlier versions of this repo shipped it. It is not trained. Every weight matrix in blk.40 sits at standard deviation 0.020, kurtosis 3.00, and a largest value of 5 standard deviations — which is exactly a fresh N(0, 0.02) initialization. Every trained layer in the same file has kurtosis 4 to 39 and outliers past 14 standard deviations, because training grows heavy tails. The same measurement on Qwen3.6-27B's and Qwen3.8-27B's MTP heads gives kurtosis near 900 and outliers past 60 — those are trained; this one never was.

Drafts from random weights are accepted at chance, so the block was 2.4% of every file doing no work. Removing it changes no output and saves roughly 0.3 to 0.9 GB per tier. Nothing else was touched: the remaining weights are byte-identical to the previous upload, not re-quantized.

Credits

ornith-ai — the Ornith-1.5-35B-A3B model and weights (MIT).
Unsloth — the Dynamic GGUF quantization method this reproduces.
llama.cpp — llama-quantize / llama-imatrix.

MIT, inheriting Ornith-1.5's license.