I looked at the numbers you posted, and am feeling concerned with how aggressively you're commenting towards a number of people on this website.
For starters, I started in this field a few years after the 2012 wave started. I've been with it for a while and have seen a lot of trends come and go. One thing that stays the same is that things are always changing. Very few things are set in stone, and due to a few other things it takes years and years before anything even begins to be finalized.
The numbers you are quoting are from various research groups, and are days to weeks old. You've antagonized a number of users in this forum, from calling them wrong directly, or saying that another person is empirically incorrect based on numbers you haven't verified yourself, and that have not had time to settle in the field yet with respect to real-world usecases. I went to one of the methods you linked, GPTQ, and it indeed had a _good_ performance to size improvement, but was not 'no difference'. This also does not count that 4-bit GPU support is still not-well supported. On 13B, for 4-bit, a .1 perplexity difference is great, but I also believe that that is also at least a noticeable drop. The .42 perplexity drop for 3 bit is massive, but also still very information efficient.
This completely ignores the conversation about (back to the GPU side of things) kernel-level support for these operators, which is very underdeveloped. Technical and unvalidated lab numbers do not represent the real world, it's like battery technologies. They are two very different things, though there are impressive tech demos and numbers out there. Like many things, in my experience, at least, it comes down to a big 'it depends'. It'll all settle out in the wash and we'll see what methods end up reigning in the long run.
Again -- please stop attacking other HN users based on a partial -- if well-researched -- understanding of the subject matter. It seems you're very involved in this topic, and I agree that more people need to hear about it. I think you could do an excellent job in sharing that news to them. That is good, and I hope the evangelism efforts go well and wish you all the best on that front. However, it seems (and this may be an inappropriate judgement on my end) that you might have become personally entangled in what is generally a technical issue.
I am just a commenter on this website, though I have used hacker news for a very long time at this point. I requested previously that you tamp down flaming the other users a bit, and I'd like to ask you once more. A good litmus test to maybe ask yourself is "Am I including any information in this message that indicates that another person may be right or wrong, or that I might be right or wrong? How strongly do I feel that my perspective is reality vs their incorrect perspective?" If you trigger that line when writing out a comment -- even if there is a strong impulse to ignore it, it may be time to step back, breathe, and separate out what is a personal issue for you, and what is a technical issue that you are passionate about. You can have both at once.
Please just slow it down a bit. I want to see what you and everyone else can mutually bring to the table in this conversation. Thank you.
