A Visual Guide to Quantization – Demystifying the Compression of LLMs
A Visual Guide to QuantizationDemystifying the Compression of Large Language ModelsMaarten GrootendorstJul 22, 20245302644ShareTranslations - Korean - Chinese - FrenchAs their name suggests, Large Language Models (LLMs) are often too large to run on consumer hardware. These models may exceed billions of parameters and generally need GPUs with large amounts of VRAM to speed up inference.As such, more and more research has been focused on making these models smaller through improved training, adapters, etc. One major technique in this field is called quantization.In this post, I will introduce the field of quantization in the context of language modeling and explore concepts one by one to develop an intuition about the field.
- ▪A Visual Guide to QuantizationDemystifying the Compression of Large Language ModelsMaarten GrootendorstJul 22, 20245302644ShareTranslations - Korean - Chinese - FrenchAs their name suggests, Large Language Models (LLMs) are often too large
- ▪These models may exceed billions of parameters and generally need GPUs with large amounts of VRAM to speed up inference.As such, more and more research has been focused on making these models smaller through improved training, adapters, etc
- ▪One major technique in this field is called quantization.In this post, I will introduce the field of quantization in the context of language modeling and explore concepts one by one to develop an intuition about the field.
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| Canonical URL | https://newsletter.maartengrootendorst.com/p/a-visual-guide-to-quantization |
| Publication time | Thu, 06 Aug 2026 21:27:20 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-08-06T22:15:47.505Z |
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A Visual Guide to QuantizationDemystifying the Compression of Large Language ModelsMaarten GrootendorstJul 22, 20245302644ShareTranslations - Korean - Chinese - FrenchAs their name suggests, Large Language Models (LLMs) are often too large to run on consumer hardware. These models may exceed billions of parameters and generally need GPUs with large amounts of VRAM to speed up inference.As such, more and more research has been focused on making these models smaller through improved training, adapters, etc. One major technique in this field is called quantization.In this post, I will introduce the field of quantization in the context of language modeling and explore concepts one by one to develop an intuition about the field.
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