# You Got mlx-serve'd!

> Source: <https://pac.commonsware.com/archive/you-got-mlx-served/>
> Published: 2026-08-31 16:33:13+00:00

Earlier, I wrote about [Qwen 3.8 being good but slow](https://pac.commonsware.com/archive/qwen-38-quality-sans-speed/). Since then, I have been trying to figure out how to boost the speed of running Qwen 3.8 on my 64GB M2 Ultra Mac Studio.

What is working for me [is mlx-serve](https://github.com/ddalcu/mlx-serve). This is kinda Ollama-ish, in that it has an inference server with an associated GUI. Overall, it does quite a bit more than Ollama does. But the biggest thing is that it runs Qwen 3.8

On the one hand, that means that Sonnet is much faster and gives higher-quality results. On the other hand, *Qwen 3.8 is a local model*:

Right now, I am having Sonnet review Qwen's work, but so far, Qwen has reliably delivered what it was supposed to do. And this is about a 4x speed increase from what I had with my Ollama-based Qwen 3.8 setup.

Part of that speed increase may be from better MLX support in `mlx-serve`

than in Ollama. The bigger thing might be the support that `mlx-serve`

has for MTP (Multi-Token Prediction). MTP is a form of "speculative decoding", where lesser models do the heavy lifting and the top-tier model chooses among their outputs. Qwen 3.6 and 3.8 offer MTP, and `mlx-serve`

lets me toggle that on.

There are clear limits. Having Qwen 3.8 do agentic coding consumes 99% of the GPU of my Mac Studio, and that is with just a single conversation. Agent swarms require a fleet of hardware, not just a single Mac.

Still, this is more than good enough for lightweight tasks and lets me offload some of my development from frontier models and their data centers.
