Perplexity open-sourced Lily, an Apple-Silicon inference server that supports exactly one checkpoint

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Perplexity published Lily under Apache 2.0 inside its pplx-garden repo, a small Metal inference server built for a single checkpoint, Qwen3.6-35B-A3B converted to MLX affine 4-bit, exposing a minimal OpenAI-compatible chat API with greedy decoding. The README explicitly rules out dense and smaller Qwen checkpoints, BF16, GGUF, AWQ, GPTQ, int8 and fp8, and requires Apple GPU family 10 or later (M5 and newer) plus macOS 26. Performance reports in the repo are dated September 1 and 2, 2026, so this is days old, and the deliberate one-model scope is the interesting engineering choice.