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NitpickLawyertoday at 4:36 PM0 repliesview on HN

It really depends. It used to be easier to have a rule of thumb, but now it's not clear anymore. Now there are a lot of things to consider, such as a model's kv efficiency (how much context you can fit), MoE v. dense, QAT or not (Quant aware training) and so on.

The old rule of thumb was that a lower quant of a larger model > higher quant of a smaller model. That being said, for some things going lower than fp8 will see a lot of degradation in generation quality. Except if the model comes with QAT 4bit quants. Then there's also nvfp4 w/ calibration data, which also can improve things. So it's really not easy to tell "at a glance" you'd have to test them yourself on your hardware.