Apriel-1.5-15B-Thinker — MLX 2-bit (Apple Silicon)

🔎 What is Apriel-1.5-15B-Thinker?

This card documents the 2-bit MLX conversion. Expect higher compression and noticeable quality drop vs FP/Int or 6-bit, especially on fine-grained text in images, dense charts, or long-chain reasoning.

📦 What’s in this repo

• config.json (MLX config mapped for Pixtral-style VLM)
• mlx_model*.safetensors (2-bit quantized shards)
• tokenizer.json, tokenizer_config.json
• processor_config.json / image_processor.json
• model_index.json and metadata

✅ Intended uses

• On-device image understanding where memory is constrained (light captioning, object/layout descriptions)
• Quick triage of screenshots, UI mocks, simple charts, forms with broad structure
• Educational demos of VLMs on Mac w/ minimal RAM budget

⚠️ Limitations

• 2-bit is very lossy. Expect degradation on:
  • OCR-heavy tasks, small fonts, dense tables
  • Multi-step math/coding with visual grounding
  • Long context or many images
• May hallucinate or miss small details. Human review is required for critical use.

🖥️ Apple-Silicon guidance

• Works: M1/M2 (8–16 GB) for short prompts + single image; recommended: M3/M4 for smoother throughput.
• Use GPU:
  --device mps