AI - Artificial intelligence

The reason why large language models are called ‘large’ is not because of how smart they are, but as a factor of their sheer size in bytes. At billions of parameters at four bytes each, they pose a serious challenge when it comes to not just their size on disk, but also in RAM, specifically the RAM of your videocard (VRAM). Reducing this immense size, as is done routinely for the smaller pretrained models which one can download for local use, involves quantization. This process is explained and demonstrated by [Codeically], who takes it to its logical extreme: reducing what could be a GB-sized model down to a mere 63 MB by reducing the bits per parameter.