Audience
AI infrastructure engineers who need fast, private local model inference and an OpenAI-compatible backend for applications and coding agents
About BaseRT
BaseRT is a high-performance LLM inference runtime for Apple Silicon that lets developers pull models from Hugging Face, chat with them locally, or serve an OpenAI-compatible API from one CLI. Accelerated by hand-written Metal kernels, it is designed to deliver fast prefill and decode performance on M-series Macs, with published benchmarks showing up to 6.4× faster prefill than llama.cpp, 3.9× faster than MLX, and up to 1.33× faster decode. The basert CLI handles model downloading, conversion, interactive chat, serving, completion, benchmarking, inspection, and bundle signing. Its server supports chat, completions, embeddings, transcription, tool calls, continuous batching, paged KV caching, and prefix caching, while supported models can process text, vision, and audio. BaseRT uses its own .base model format with Q2–Q8 affine quantization, optional AWQ calibration, and signed bundles, and can convert GGUF, Hugging Face, and MLX checkpoints.