mlx-tune
ARahim3
Unsloth-compatible fine-tuning for LLMs, VLMs, TTS and STT on Apple Silicon via MLX.
What is mlx-tune?
mlx-tune wraps Apple's MLX with an API intentionally compatible with Unsloth (the popular CUDA fine-tuner), letting Mac users run SFT, DPO, GRPO, vision-model training and TTS/STT fine-tuning locally on unified memory. Ships 50+ examples and 39+ supported model architectures including MoE.
Pros & Cons
Pros
- Unsloth-compatible API lowers migration friction from CUDA fine-tuning workflows
- Apple Silicon unified memory allows fine-tuning larger models locally than typical VRAM permits (project's own claim)
- Covers LLM, VLM, TTS, STT and embeddings from one library
Cons
- Apple Silicon only - no path to CUDA servers where most production training runs
- Early community (few battle-tested failure reports)
- Performance figures are self-reported
License
Apache-2.0 (OSI-open)
When it is interesting
Practitioners who prototype fine-tuned models on a Mac and want to stay in the Apple ecosystem for small runs.
When it is too early
If you need training at scale or must reproduce results on CUDA hardware.
Commercial alternative & related
- Commercial counterpart: Unsloth / Modal
This repo featured in the 2026-07 edition of the Open-Source AI Radar.
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