Perplexity Open Sources Lily: A Rust + Metal Inference Engine for Qwen3.6-35B-A3B on Apple Silicon

Perplexity has open sourced Lily, a Rust and Metal-based inference engine optimized for running the Qwen3.6-35B-A3B model on Apple Silicon Macs with at least 24 GB RAM. Lily bypasses PyTorch and MLX for improved performance by specializing its runtime for this model and hardware, enabling efficient 4-bit quantized inference with a minimal OpenAI-compatible API.