Model reference · open weights

Apriel

LLMs ServiceNow-AI Text gen 1 build Open weights 1k dl/mo

Apriel is an open-weight language model from ServiceNow-AI. Apriel-5B-Instruct (BF16) weighs 9.7 GB; the smallest configuration that runs it is RTX 3060 12 GB.

  • Apriel-5B-Instruct is a 4.8B parameter text-generation model developed by ServiceNow-AI for general-purpose instruction tasks such as question answering, code assistance, and logical reasoning.
  • The model supports a context length of 16,384 tokens and is primarily optimized for English.
  • It is released under the MIT license.

Summary of the ServiceNow-AI/Apriel-5B-Instruct model card, 2026-10-01

What it is

Released byServiceNow-AI
Released2025-04-11
Parameters4.8B
VRAM9.7 GB for the weights

What it runs on

Memory and cards for Apriel-5B-Instruct (BF16)

9.7 GBweights, file size
115 MBcache per 1K tokens
698 MBruntime overhead, at least
16,384 tokenscontext max
CardRequests at onceContext maxMemory
8K each
RTX 3060 12 GB110K11.6 GB
RTX 4060 Ti 16 GB5all 16K15.4 GB
RTX 3090 24 GB13all 16K23.4 GB
RTX 4090 24 GB13all 16K23.4 GB
RTX 5090 32 GB21all 16K31.0 GB
L40S 48 GB35all 16K44.0 GB
A100 80 GB72all 16K78.2 GB
H100 80 GB67all 16K78.1 GB
RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell 96 GB84all 16K93.8 GB
DGX Spark (GB10) 128 GB unified98all 16K107 GB
H200 141 GB131all 16K138 GB
B200 180 GB171all 16K176 GB
2× RTX 3060 12 GB
tensor parallel
12all 16K11.6 GB a card
2× RTX 4060 Ti 16 GB
tensor parallel
21all 16K15.4 GB a card
Memory needed at each load
Requests at once8K tokens each
111.3 GB
515.1 GB
817.9 GB
1625.4 GB
3240.4 GB
6470.5 GB

One card, with vLLM's small-card settings.

From the model card

What ServiceNow-AI says about Apriel

Read the model card

/ˈɑː.pri.əl/

Table of Contents

  1. Model Summary
  2. Evaluation
  3. Intended Use
  4. Limitations
  5. Security and Responsible Use
  6. License
  7. Citation

Model Summary

Apriel is a family of models built for versatility, offering high throughput and efficiency across a wide range of tasks.

Apriel-5B-Base

Apriel-5B-base is a decoder-only transformer trained on 4.5T+ tokens of data. It is the first release in the Apriel model family, designed to support research on foundation models. Apriel-5B-base achieves strong performance across common benchmarks for models under 5B parameters.

Apriel-5B-Instruct

Apriel-5B-Instruct is built on top of Apriel-5B-base using continual pretraining (CPT), supervised finetuning (SFT), and post-training alignment with DPO and RLVR.

Both CPT and SFT stages involved training multiple domain-biased variants with overlapping datasets (e.g., instruction, code, math). These were then merged to form a more general-purpose model before alignment. The final model is aligned for instruction following, reasoning, and safety-aware dialogue.

The y-axis shows average downstream benchmark scores. Throughput (x-axis) was measured using vLLM with batch size 8, 256 input tokens, and 32 output tokens.

How to Use

pip install transformers
Running the Base model
import torch
from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizer

checkpoint = "ServiceNow-AI/Apriel-5B-Base"
device = "cuda"  # or "cpu"

tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(checkpoint)
model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(checkpoint, torch_dtype=torch.bfloat16).to(device)

inputs = tokenizer.encode("Snow is", return_tensors="pt").to(device)
outputs = model.generate(inputs)
print(tokenizer.decode(outputs[0]))
>>> print(f"Memory footprint: {model.get_memory_footprint() / 1e6:.2f} MB")
Memory footprint: 9664.14 MB
Running the Instruct model
import torch
from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizer

checkpoint = "ServiceNow-AI/Apriel-5B-Instruct"
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(checkpoint)
device = "cuda" if torch.cuda.is_available() else "cpu"

model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(
    checkpoint,
    torch_dtype=torch.bfloat16 if device == "cuda" else torch.float32
).to(device)

messages = [
    {"role": "system", "content": "You are a helpful AI assistant that provides accurate and concise information."},
    {"role": "user", "content": "Tell me about artificial intelligence"}
]

input_text = tokenizer.apply_chat_template(messages, tokenize=False, add_generation_prompt=True)
inputs = tokenizer(input_text, return_tensors="pt").to(device)

generation_params = {
    "max_new_tokens": 512,
    "temperature": 0.2,
    "top_p": 0.9,
    "do_sample": True
}

outputs = model.generate(**inputs, **generation_params)
response = tokenizer.decode(outputs[0], skip_special_tokens=True)
print(response)

Chat Template

System message here (optional)
User message here
Assistant response here

If no system message is provided, the model inserts a blank system prompt to maintain format structure. The model supports structured interaction patterns, including tool calling and reasoning steps for more advanced workflows.

Evaluation

Evaluations were conducted using lm-eval-harness and evalchemy.

Apriel-5B-Base

Task NameApriel-5B-BaseOLMo-2-1124-7BLlama-3.1-8BMistral-Nemo-Base-2407
Average58.758.7161.7266.01
ARC Challenge56.762.758.262.9
ARC Easy82.486.085.786.7
MMMLU44.535.347.454.7
Global MMLU57.452.461.168.4
GSM8k64.263.254.858.5
HellaSwag74.480.578.882.7
MUSR39.139.638.039.9
MBPP27.622.446.054.6
MMLU61.363.966.069.6
PIQA78.981.181.282.1

Apriel-5B-Instruct

Task NameApriel-5B-InstructOLMo-2-1124-7B-InstructLlama-3.1-8B-InstructMistral-Nemo-Instruct-2407
Average49.6443.9152.6048.63
ARC Challenge59.0461.4564.2566.38
GSM8k80.3679.6882.6377.63
Hellaswag74.5280.2178.4381.71
BBH39.8239.9550.8650.06
GPQA28.3627.85

Quoted from the model card on Hugging Face. The full card is behind the Hugging Face link above.

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