12.53 GiB — the smallest coherent build of this model, and it runs resident on a 16 GB Mac mini (measured). If you have the memory and want the best quality per byte instead, use tq4-g64, which actually beats affine 4-bit.

Where this sits

build	size	PPL ↓	decode
`mlx-community/Muse-Glimmer-30B-4bit`	19.88 GiB	4.3798	26.1 tok/s
`tq4-g64`	14.88 GiB	4.3315	9.4 tok/s
this build (`tq3-g64`)	12.53 GiB	5.0454	10.9 tok/s

800-token fixed-passage perplexity, greedy, Apple M4 Max 64 GB, same harness for every row. Lower is better.

Be clear-eyed about the 3-bit step. PPL 5.05 against 4.33 is a real quality cost — about 15% — and it is the price of 3-bit, not a defect in the method. The matched-4-bit control is what isolates that: at the same bit width TurboQuant beats affine on quality in 25% less space. Take this build when 12.5 GiB is the constraint; take tq4 otherwise.

Install

pip install "turboquant-mlx-full[vlm]>=0.21.1"

That is the whole install. [vlm] pulls mlx-vlm >= 0.6.12, the first release carrying the muse_glimmer model classes (PR #1838, merged 2026-08-10).

Following older instructions? They pinned mlx-vlm to a git commit and forced transformers==5.15.0. Both are obsolete, and the git pin is now actively wrong: the merged #1838 moved the embedding norm out of NormedEmbedding, and turboquant-mlx < 0.21.0 crashes against it with AttributeError: module '...muse_glimmer.language' has no attribute 'NormedEmbedding'. Use >= 0.21.1 and drop every pin.

Sanity-check before downloading 12 GB:

bash

python -c "
import turboquant_mlx; print(turboquant_mlx.__version__)
from mlx_vlm.models import muse_glimmer; print('muse_glimmer OK')"

Usage

bash

python -m turboquant_mlx.generate_vlm \
  --model manjunathshiva/Muse-Glimmer-30B-tq3-g64 \
  --prompt "Write a Python function that returns the n-th Fibonacci number." \
  --max-tokens 512

Muse Glimmer emits a reasoning channel before its answer. Pass --reasoning low|medium|high|xhigh to control how long it deliberates — the default is high, which spends hundreds of tokens before a short answer and is most of the wall clock on a slow machine. --no-think asks for the least it supports (there is no "off" level, so it still thinks briefly). Meta recommends temperature 1.0, top_p 0.95, top_k 64.

Serve it (OpenAI-compatible)

bash

turboquant-serve-vlm \
  --model manjunathshiva/Muse-Glimmer-30B-tq3-g64 \
  --reasoning-strength low --port 8080

turboquant-serve wraps mlx_lm.server, which cannot load multimodal architectures — use turboquant-serve-vlm (0.21.1+), which drives mlx-vlm's server: OpenAI and Anthropic routes, per-model tool parsers, continuous batching.

Tool calling works — finish_reason: tool_calls with correct name and arguments, and tool-result round trips answer correctly. Two Muse-specific problems are handled for you, and both fail silently if you serve this model any other way:

The reasoning channel is kept out of content. Muse answers in a harmony-style channel format, and the ATEM tool parser only strips that envelope when a tool call was parsed. So tool turns look fine while an ordinary turn hands the caller the model's private deliberation as its reply. Here it goes to reasoning_content, where it belongs.
reasoning_effort actually reaches the template. OpenAI clients send reasoning_effort; this template only reads reasoning_strength, and otherwise deliberates at its high default. Requests are translated, and --reasoning-strength sets the default for clients that send nothing — which is most agent harnesses. Measured: a tool-result turn cost 54 completion tokens at low versus 106 at high, for the same answer.

Agentic coding & vision — measured

OpenCode: 3/3 pass. Task: a repo with a planted off-by-one in average() and a failing pytest suite; the prompt gives the exact venv command and asks to run → find → fix → re-run. Every run executed the given command first try, made the correct minimal edit (sum(values) / len(values)), and left the test file byte-identical to a fresh reference — a pass here means the bug was really fixed, not that the tests were edited until they agreed.

runs	wall clock	requests	tool actions
3 at `--reasoning-strength low`	640 / 728 / 795 s	7–8	4–5
1 at `medium`	608 s	7	4

No run drifted: action counts stayed in a tight band, with none of the cross-turn perseveration that sinks smaller/harsher quantizations in agent harnesses. medium passes too but buys nothing measurable — stay on low.

Vision: 4/4, against mlx-community/Muse-Glimmer-30B-4bit as a control at 4/4. OCR of rendered text, counting with distractor shapes, reading which bar of a chart is tallest, and naming the shape in the top-left — all correct, ~11–13 s per image.

That control matters: this build quantizes embed_tokens and the entire 50-layer ViT-G/14 vision tower, which the affine 4-bit build leaves in bf16. Compressing them cost nothing measurable on these cases. Caveat: 4/4 vs 4/4 means no regression detected, not identical vision quality — these are clean synthetic images with unambiguous answers, not a vision benchmark.

Fixed in 0.21.1 — use it for agents. On 0.21.0 the model completes the work but never emits a closing summary, and every run ends at the passing test. That was a serving bug, not the model: ATEM's tool_call_start is to=self<|message|>, the same string Muse Glimmer opens every turn with, so mlx-vlm's streaming content suppressor latched on the first reasoning token and dropped everything after it. Any client that declares tools saw an empty final message. Re-verified after the fix: prose after the passing test goes 0 → 6 lines on both builds, with tool calls, action counts and the test-file md5 unchanged.

Full method, per-run numbers and reproduce steps: docs/RESULTS_MUSE.md.

Will it fit my Mac?

Real turboquant-plan output for this model, on an M4 Max 64 GB:

Model
  type                 muse_glimmer  (turboquant 3-bit g64)
  weights (exact)      13.46 GB

Machine
  Metal working set    55.66 GB   ← the real ceiling
  system RAM           68.72 GB

Projection at 16,384 tokens of context
  weights              13.46 GB
  KV cache             0.30 GB  (17.9 KB/token, hybrid: 13/52 full-attention, 39 sliding (window 2048))
  prefill workspace    6.70 GB  (estimate, at --prefill-step-size 2048)
  runtime reserve      1.00 GB  (buffer cache, activations, fragmentation)
                       ----------------------------------
  peak                 21.45 GB of 61.85 GB usable   40.40 GB headroom

Verdict: ✅ RESIDENT — fits fully in memory

Check your own machine first:

turboquant-plan --model manjunathshiva/Muse-Glimmer-30B-tq3-g64 --ram-gb 24

The KV cache is unusually cheap — 17.9 KB/token, 0.30 GB at 16K context — because 39 of 52 layers use a 2048-token sliding window.

16 GB Mac mini: yes — measured, not projected

This build runs resident on a 16 GB Mac mini. Verified on a Mac16,10 / macOS 26.5.2 with the wired cap raised, all five prompt lengths passing:

prompt	peak	prefill	decode	wall
69 tok	13.15 GiB	2.4 tok/s (cold)	3.70 tok/s	57 s
268 tok	13.44 GiB	19.9 tok/s	3.70 tok/s	59 s
868 tok	14.13 GiB	20.2 tok/s	3.44 tok/s	92 s
2068 tok	13.91 GiB	17.0 tok/s	3.38 tok/s	151 s
5068 tok	14.21 GiB	6.0 tok/s	3.56 tok/s	887 s

For context, Meta's own smallest Apple Silicon artifact is 17.95 GB, text-only and without the drafter — larger than the mini's entire RAM.

Two caveats that matter more than the headline:

Headroom is 0.20 GB at 5068 tokens (15.26 GB peak against 15.46 GB usable). This is the edge of the machine. Close other apps; a browser can push it over.
Prefill collapses past ~2000 tokens — 20 tok/s at 868 tokens, 6 tok/s at 5068, so a 5000-word prompt costs ~14 minutes before the first token. Decode holds steady at ~3.5 tok/s throughout, which places the blame on memory pressure during prefill rather than the kernel. Treat ~2000 tokens as the practical interactive limit and longer prompts as batch work.

Required setup:

bash

sudo sysctl -w iogpu.wired_limit_mb=14336     # resets on reboot
TURBOQUANT_QMM_MAX_TOKENS=1000000 python -m turboquant_mlx.generate_vlm \
  --model manjunathshiva/Muse-Glimmer-30B-tq3-g64 --prompt "..." --max-tokens 256

The default wired cap on a 16 GB Mac is ~10.5 GB — below the weights alone — so the sysctl is mandatory, not an optimization.

The smaller alternative does not work: a tq3a-tq2e-g64 hybrid (3-bit attention, 2-bit MLP) fits at 9.63 GiB but measures PPL 7.5547 against this build's 5.0454, and visibly corrupts text. 2-bit on a dense MLP is not a usable tier.

Squeezing peak memory

TurboQuant 0.20.0 added polar_qmm, a fused kernel that runs batched matmuls straight off the packed weights instead of dequantizing them first. It is used automatically for prompt chunks of ≤ 256 tokens, which is why prefill peak over resident weights fell 3.86 GB → 0.62 GB at 64 tokens. Two knobs follow from that:

bash

# Smaller prefill chunks keep you on the fused path (turboquant-plan will
# recommend a size for your machine):
--prefill-step-size 256

# Force the fused kernel at ALL chunk sizes. Halves peak on long prompts
# (2048 tokens: 4.88 -> 2.89 GB) and costs throughput (142 -> 72 tok/s):
TURBOQUANT_QMM_MAX_TOKENS=1000000 python -m turboquant_mlx.generate_vlm ...

How it was made

bash

python -m turboquant_mlx.convert_vlm \
  --hf-path meta-models/Muse-Glimmer-30B \
  --mlx-path ./Muse-Glimmer-30B-tq3-g64 \
  --bits 3 --group-size 64 --quantize-extras --extras-bits 4

Data-free: randomized Hadamard rotation, per-group RMS scaling, nearest Lloyd-Max centroid. No calibration set. Transformer linears are 3-bit polar codebook (3.25 bpw); lm_head, the embedding and the vision tower are 4-bit affine.

lm_head is deliberately affine — at 1.345B parameters, routing it through TurboQuant's dense prefill path would cost ~19 GB of transient peak to save 0.21 GB on disk.

Limitations

3-bit costs real quality (~15% PPL vs 4-bit). Validate on your own prompts before relying on it.
Slower decode than affine 4-bit (10.9 vs 26.1 tok/s).
Needs mlx-vlm >= 0.6.12 and turboquant-mlx >= 0.21.1; older turboquant-mlx crashes against the merged mlx-vlm.
Perplexity is a single 800-token passage on one domain — a sanity check, not a broad evaluation. Meta's published benchmarks are for bf16 and have not been re-measured here.
Vision-tower quality at 4-bit affine, and agentic/tool-calling behaviour, have not been measured on this build.

Licence

Apache-2.0, inherited from the base model. LICENSE and Meta's USAGE_POLICY.md are included in this repo; the usage policy applies to derivatives.