[vpanyam]

In addition to the benefits mentioned in the sibling comment, zip files let you seek to and access individual files in the archive without extracting all files (vs tar files for example).

This lets us do things like fetch model metadata [1] for a large remote model, by only fetching a few tiny byte ranges instead of the whole model archive.

It also means you can include sample data (images, etc) with your model and they're only fetched when necessary (for example with stable diffusion: https://carton.pub/stabilityai/sdxl)

[1] https://carton.run/docs/metadata