What follows is a ‘hint sequence’ to get Transformers working on Big Sur 11.1 @ Apple Silicon M1.
Please try it with most care, and consider it “AS IS” -it has been proven twice, but I cannot be responsible for any unintended behaviour-


Install Xcode cmd line tool chain
$ xcode-select --install


Install homebrew
 /bin/bash -c "(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh 8)"


…and a couple of utils. Rustup from source is the key to get Transformers working on M1.
 brew install vim wget
 brew install --build-from-source rustup-init


Install miniforge -put it in a temp directory of your choice-
 wget https://github.com/conda-forge/miniforge/releases/latest/download/Miniforge3-MacOSX-arm64.sh
 bash Miniforge3-MacOSX-arm64.sh


refresh your env variables (run again the shell bash/zsh: effective while inelegant  )
 bash 
 conda config --set auto_activate_base false && conda deactivate


Download TensorFlow 2.4 from Apple M1 BUT DON’T INSTALL IT, YET!
$ cd $HOME && git clone https://github.com/apple/tensorflow_macos.git 36 && cd tensorflow_macos/arm64


Create a Conda (virtual) environment -and always restart a shell session-
 bash && conda create --name tf24transformers
 conda activate tf24transformers && conda install -y python=3.8.6
$ conda install -y pandas matplotlib scikit-learn jupyterlab


Install Apple Tensorflow (ATF)2.4. You’re already in arm64. (If not cd to $HOME/tensorflow_macos/arm64).


7.1)
$ pip install --force pip==20.2.4 wheel setuptools cached-property six
7.2) Install the packages from Apple
$ pip install --upgrade --no-dependencies --force numpy-1.18.5-cp38-cp38-macosx_11_0_arm64.whl grpcio-1.33.2-cp38-cp38-macosx_11_0_arm64.whl h5py-2.10.0-cp38-cp38-macosx_11_0_arm64.whl tensorflow_addons-0.11.2+mlcompute-cp38-cp38-macosx_11_0_arm64.whl
7.3) Some dependencies…
$ pip install absl-py astunparse flatbuffers gast google_pasta keras_preprocessing opt_einsum protobuf tensorflow_estimator termcolor typing_extensions wrapt wheel tensorboard typeguard
7.4) Install ATF
$ pip install --upgrade --force --no-dependencies tensorflow_macos-0.1a1-cp38-cp38-macosx_11_0_arm64.whl
7.5) Refresh your shell once more and you are done
 bash && conda activate tf24transformers
 python -m pip install --upgrade pip
 pip install tokenizers transformers
 python -c “from transformers import pipeline; print(pipeline(‘sentiment-analysis’)(‘we love you’))”
[{‘label’: ‘POSITIVE’, ‘score’: 0.9998704791069031}]
Many thanks to Fabrice Daniel for the tutorial about AFT2.4.
Ciao
Ernesto