each layer is made up of various weights, the weights are adjusted to quant it. a pure q8 will have all the weights as q8, or a q4 the same. but some are kept as f32, etc. here's an example of q3_k_xl - https://huggingface.co/unsloth/Kimi-K2-Thinking-GGUF/tree/ma... we can see certain weights are f32, q8, q5, q3, etc. They used mxfp4 in some weights and mxfp4 doesn't seem to place nicely in quants so that's why they are retiring it. read their publication again and it should make more sense.