Autoresearch Qwen3.5-397B: 36 Experiments to Reach 20.34 tok/s on M5 Max 128GB

r/LocalLLaMA·medium signal

A developer ran 36 automated experiments optimizing Qwen3.5-397B inference on Apple M5 Max 128GB, starting from a baseline of 10.61 tok/s (up from 4.36 tok/s on M3 Max) and reaching 20.34 tok/s. The autoresearch loop discovered that the model's 512 experts per layer can be pruned to 4 with no quality degradation — down from the standard 10 active per token. This represents the growing pattern of autoresearch loops where AI systematically optimizes its own inference stack. Reddit: r/LocalLLaMA (130↑, 32 comments).