Apriel-1.6-15B-Thinker arrives as the newest iteration of the Apriel SLM series: a 15-billion-parameter multimodal model designed to reason with text and images, but with a very clear focus on token and cost efficiency. What’s the result? Performance comparable to models ten times larger and more than a 30% reduction in reasoning-token usage compared to its previous version.
What is Apriel-1.6-15B-Thinker
Apriel-1.6-15B-Thinker is a 15B-parameter multimodal model aimed at deep reasoning across text and vision. It was trained on NVIDIA DGX Cloud using GB200 Grace Blackwell Superchips, and its explicit goal is to maximize the ratio between reasoning capability and inference efficiency.
On the Artificial Analysis Index (AA) it scores 57, outperforming models like Gemini 2.5 Flash, Claude Haiku 4.5 and GPT OSS 20b, and matching Qwen3 235B A22B on some evaluations — but with a much smaller compute footprint. Surprising, right? You don’t always need the biggest model to get top results.
