Perplexity Open Sources Lily: A Rust + Metal Inference Engine for Qwen3.6-35B-A3B on Apple Silicon
AITopTools Editorial TeamSeptember 3, 2026
What changed
Perplexity has released Lily as open-source software for running Qwen3.6-35B-A3B locally on Apple Silicon computers. Built with Rust and Apple’s Metal framework, it averaged faster prompt processing and response generation than MLX-LM on a 40-core, 128 GB M5 Max.
What this means for you
Developers with compatible Apple hardware can now access the code behind a local component of Perplexity Computer and potentially run this model more efficiently. Lily is narrowly optimized for one model and Apple’s chip family, so its usefulness may not extend to other hardware or models.