WebSailor-3B-MLX-8bit-community

Unofficial community MLX conversion of Alibaba-NLP/WebSailor-3B for Apple Silicon.

This repository is not an official Alibaba-NLP or Hugging Face release and does not imply endorsement by the original authors.

Conversion details

• Source model: Alibaba-NLP/WebSailor-3B
• Source revision: b317a15261674d83d851f0a14761840583bb9dce
• Output format: MLX Safetensors
• Quantization: 8-bit affine, group size 64
• Effective quantization reported by mlx-lm: 8.501 bits/weight
• Conversion tool: mlx-lm 0.31.2 with mlx 0.31.1
• Original license: Apache-2.0; see LICENSE

Install MLX-LM with:

pip install -U mlx-lm

The conversion command was:

HF_HUB_DISABLE_XET=1 mlx_lm.convert \
  --hf-path Alibaba-NLP/WebSailor-3B \
  --mlx-path ./WebSailor-3B-MLX-8bit \
  --quantize \
  --q-bits 8 \
  --q-group-size 64

Local usage

MLX-LM can resolve the Hugging Face repository ID directly:

pip install -U mlx-lm

mlx_lm.generate \
  --model eunjay/WebSailor-3B-MLX-8bit-community \
  --prompt "Reply with one short sentence." \
  --max-tokens 64

For a local checkout, replace the repository ID with ./WebSailor-3B-MLX-8bit.

The model weights alone do not browse the web; web-search or browser tool calls require an external tool/backend and an agent loop.

Tool calling and web-search scope

The original WebSailor-3B agent harness uses both search and visit tools through WebAgent. This MLX conversion was validated only with a one-shot search tool-call smoke test; the full WebSailor/WebAgent search + visit harness was not run against this conversion.

For the smoke test, an explicit JSON-format instruction was supplied so the model emitted a parser-compatible call:

If you need the search tool, output exactly one valid JSON object between <tool_call> and </tool_call>. Use double-quoted keys and this shape: {"name":"search","arguments":{"query":["query text"]}}. Never output YAML labels such as name: or arguments:.

The local OpenAI-compatible MLX server parsed that single call successfully. The search service itself remains external and must execute the requested query. This result is not validation of the complete WebSailor search agent or its visit flow.

Compatibility note

Hugging Face may display Pi, Hermes, or OpenClaw connection examples automatically for compatible serving endpoints. Those examples indicate endpoint connectivity, not validation of WebSailor's search-agent behavior. Tool-call markers and parsers can vary across MLX-LM versions, so treat the result above as a one-shot smoke test and verify the full agent harness before production use.

Attribution

Please retain the original model attribution and Apache-2.0 license when redistributing this conversion. This repository contains converted weights and supporting tokenizer/configuration files; it is not a replacement for the original model card or project code.