John Bush
373 posts

John Bush
@johnnyb
Software developer and technology junkie.


[1/7] New paper alert! Heard about the BitNet hype or that Llama-3 is harder to quantize? Our new work studies both! We formulate scaling laws for precision, across both pre and post-training arxiv.org/pdf/2411.04330. TLDR; - Models become harder to post-train quantize as they are overtrained on lots of data, so that eventually more pretraining data can be actively harmful if quantizing post-training! - The effects of putting weights, activations, or attention in varying precisions during pretraining are consistent and predictable, and fitting a scaling law suggests that pretraining at high (BF16) and next-generation (FP4) precisions may both be suboptimal design choices! Joint work with @ZackAnkner @bfspector @blake__bordelon @Muennighoff @mansiege @CPehlevan @HazyResearch @AdtRaghunathan.






















