Native BF16 MLX conversion of
ai-sage/GigaChat3.1-Audio-10B-A1.8B
for Apple Silicon. It accepts audio plus a text instruction and produces text:
audio QA, transcription, translation, emotion analysis, temporal grounding,
and timestamped summaries.
This is an independent port, not an official release by the upstream authors.
* Time to process a 5 min 17 sec audio file on Apple M4 Pro. Lower is better.
Choose Q8/BF16 when size, memory, and speed matter; choose BF16 for the best
measured answer quality. Both variants use the same
gigachat-audio-mlx runtime.
The original model and paper are by Aleksandr Kutsakov, Mariia Sadovina,
Georgii Gospodinov, Alexandr Maximenko, Oleg Kutuzov, Pavel Bogomolov, and
Fyodor Minkin. The
upstream model card
declares MIT. See the runtime license
and third-party notices.
What do I need to run it?
Model
Model size
Free disk to set aside
Measured whole-process memory
Processing 5 min 17 sec*
BF16
22.54 GB
about 25 GB
22.84 GiB
10.41 s · 30.5× realtime
* Time to process a 5 min 17 sec audio file on Apple M4 Pro. Lower is better.
The free-disk figure is a rounded practical reserve; the CLI dry run reports
the exact value. Memory is measured use, not a minimum-memory guarantee. This
release is verified only on a 48 GB Mac; 16/24/32 GB support is not yet claimed.
Why MLX matters on this Mac
Same Apple M4 Pro / 48 GB. Original is a stopped memory-safety smoke, not a
completed speed benchmark; MLX values are medians of five clean runs.
Runtime
Audio
Outcome
Whole-process footprint
Original PyTorch BF16 on MPS
9.84 s
No answer after 277 s; stopped
at least 51.92 GiB
MLX BF16
317.27 s
Completed in 10.41 s
22.84 GiB
MLX Q8/BF16
317.27 s
Completed in 6.90 s
14.80 GiB
The pinned upstream Transformers path is demonstrated for CUDA. On MPS it
exceeded this Mac's safe memory budget and nearly filled system swap during the
short smoke. The 5-minute Original run was not started, so no speedup ratio is
claimed. MLX is what makes the model usable on the tested Mac.
The dry run reports the exact download size, cache hits, free disk space, and
destination before any network transfer. The runtime never executes remote
model code.
The model repository contains no executable Python. model_manifest.json
pins the source lineage and SHA-256 of every data file. Loading fails on a
missing, changed, or unexpected artifact.
Results available today
The BF16 port is the accepted native MLX baseline. In the frozen 50-item parity
gallery, its decoded text exactly matched the original PyTorch BF16 output on
41/50 inputs. This is an implementation-parity diagnostic, not an aggregate
quality score.
What changes with Q8/BF16
Lower is better in every row. Both models used the same MLX workloads.
Metric
MLX BF16
MLX Q8/BF16
Change
Model size, decimal GB
22.54
13.75
−39.0%
Whole-process memory, 5-minute profile
22.84 GiB
14.80 GiB
−35.2%
End-to-end time, 5-minute profile
10.41 s
6.90 s
−33.7%
Responses with a factual error, lower is better
26/64 (40.63%)
29/64 (45.31%)
+3 responses (+4.69 pp)
The 5-minute workload contains 317.27 seconds of audio. Resource values are the
median of five clean processes on the verified M4 Pro / 48 GB machine.
Q8/BF16 is the smaller, faster option; BF16 provides the best measured answer
quality. In the blinded review, Q8/BF16 had factual errors in 3 more cases.
From Original to MLX
Check
Original PyTorch BF16
MLX BF16
MLX Q8/BF16
Model size, decimal GB
23.73
22.54
13.75
Exact decoded-text agreement
Reference
41/50 vs Original
45/50 vs MLX BF16
The post-publication Original PyTorch/MPS resource check did not complete even
the 9.84-second smoke on this 48 GB Mac. After 277 seconds its process footprint
had reached at least 51.92 GiB and system swap was nearly full, so it was stopped
before the 5-minute run. Original therefore remains N/A in the direct Mac RAM
and speed table; no latency is inferred from a failed, swap-dominated run.
Results reported by the Original authors
These values come from the upstream model card; we did not rerun them.
Task and dataset
Metric
Original reported result
Audio QA · MMAU
Accuracy ↑
62.2
Audio QA (Russian) · RuBQ
Accuracy ↑
60.0
Emotion · Dusha podcast
Accuracy ↑
92.4
ASR (Russian) · FLEURS ru
WER ↓
4.4
Translation · FLEURS ru→en
BLEU ↑
33.4
Temporal localization · 20–60 min
mIoU ↑
48.3
Timed summary · 20–60 min
Overall ↑
67.9
Full public release evidence separates ASR, translation, emotion, temporal
localization, timed descriptions/summaries, factual review, memory, and speed.
It does not collapse these tasks into one number. See the
full results table.
Limitations
Verified only on Apple M4 Pro with 48 GB unified memory and macOS 15.7.7.
No claim is made for 16/24/32 GB machines or every M1–M5 generation.
No 90-minute-audio support claim is made in this release.
Generated facts, emotion labels, summaries, and timestamps can be wrong and
must be checked against the source audio.
Long summaries may require a larger output-token budget, which also changes
the memory estimate.
No diarization, streaming microphone mode, speech synthesis, training, or
fine-tuning is included.
Do not use the output as the sole basis for medical, legal, employment,
safety, or surveillance decisions.
Users are responsible for consent, privacy, copyright, and dataset terms for
audio they process.
Please cite both the original paper above and this project through
CITATION.cff.
See the upstream model card and
THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md
for full attribution and provenance.