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by hnfong 876 days ago
This blog post might shed some light on the matter. If I'm understanding it correctly, it claims there are emergent features on the LLM weights that make it easier to "compress" the floats into smaller bits without losing much precision.

https://timdettmers.com/2022/08/17/llm-int8-and-emergent-fea...

Note that 2 bit quantization is generally regarded as too aggressive. Generally 4bits+ achieves a good tradeoff, see eg. https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.09720