Muse Glimmer on a 24GB M4 Pro MacBook

# Muse Glimmer on an M4 Pro MacBook

A reproducible record of downloading and running Meta's Muse Glimmer 30B
model locally with `llama.cpp` and Apple Metal.

Tested successfully on August 10, 2026:

- 16-inch MacBook Pro
- Apple M4 Pro
- 24 GB unified memory
- `muse-glimmer-30B-kquant-17gb.gguf`
- `llama.cpp` commit `4801e3c`

This setup is currently text-only. Image input requires the separate
`mmproj-kquant.gguf` perception encoder.

## What is tracked here

| Path | Purpose |
| --- | --- |
| `README.md` | Reproducible quick start |
| `notes/setup.md` | What we did, including mistakes and fixes |
| `notes/how-local-inference-works.md` | How a 17 GB model runs from disk and unified memory |

Model weights, the Python environment, caches, and the local `llama.cpp`
checkout are intentionally ignored by Git.

## 1. Create the project and optional download environment

The Python virtual environment is only needed for the Hugging Face download.
It is not used when the model runs.

```bash
mkdir -p muse-glimmer-project
cd muse-glimmer-project

python3 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
python -m pip install --upgrade huggingface_hub
```

## 2. Download the model from Hugging Face

```bash
hf download meta-models/Muse-Glimmer-30B-GGUF \
  muse-glimmer-30B-kquant-17gb.gguf \
  --local-dir .
```

The download is approximately 16.8 GB. It is normal for `ls -lh` to display
this as roughly 16 GB because tools can use different unit conventions.

The environment can now be deactivated:

```bash
deactivate
```

## 3. Get and build llama.cpp

Muse Glimmer uses a new architecture, so use a current `llama.cpp` checkout.

```bash
brew install cmake
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp.git llama.cpp
cd llama.cpp

cmake -B build \
  -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=OFF \
  -DGGML_METAL=ON \
  -DLLAMA_CURL=OFF \
  -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release

cmake --build build --config Release -j 8 \
  --target llama-cli llama-server
```

A successful build ends with:

```text
[100%] Built target llama-cli
[100%] Built target llama-server
```

## 4. Verify the binary

```bash
./build/bin/llama-cli --version
```

The tested shallow checkout reported:

```text
version: 1 (4801e3c)
built with AppleClang 21.0.0.21000101 for Darwin arm64
```

`version: 1` is expected after a `--depth 1` clone: Git can see only one local
commit. The commit hash and Muse Glimmer architecture support ar