unshloth started as a finetuning library with lots of optimisations so you could finetune on lower end hardware. Kind of OGs of the local community. Started by two brothers Michael and Daniel(?) a math wiz and a community builder/communicator. They've since gotten some VC backing, are active in quantising lots of models on release day (work w/ labs to prepare things), known for their optimised quants (use different bits for different layers). Recently I saw they launched some sort of a desktop app, like lmstudio if you're familiar with it. They're really cool people and known in the local model places.

Daniel Han is just that good!

They started with offering training methods for quantized models to save memory and added new things over time. They are very active in the local model community and have extensive documentation and tooling to help with running and training models locally.

I quantize my models with llama.cpp and it's usually one command. Some of their quants are fine-tuned by architecture but it's only to squeeze out every little performance benefit.