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by numeri 24 days ago
No, quantization is applied to model weights or the KV cache (the model activations of all past tokens), and is just storing everything with lower precision (carefully, so that it doesn't hurt performance much).

Sending an image of text instead of text reduces the number of input tokens, but they're still being processed by the model at the same precision. This probably also hurts performance in some way – the question is by how much.