haven't tried it yet though.
But yeah, 32-64 is the gateway I think. If Qwen4 can make a leap in the flast-next MoE and hit 64 GB on VRAM w/context, that's definitely the cloud killer to me.
You don't need papers, good quants are usually published with benchmark data, for example: https://huggingface.co/ISTA-DASLab/DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017-... which maintains parity with FP8 even at 2 bit.
The ISTA accuracy looks good on that page, but it's only a chosen handful. Instead, look at most of the graphs on Unsloth's Qwen 3.8 Flash Next - https://unsloth.ai/docs/models/qwen3.8-next
As always, check the quant vs KLD graphs (half way down that page).. I found that not all quants are the same - Unsloth's GLM Q4 -> Q3 degrades a lot faster than their Minimax M3.1 Q4 -> Q3 ggufs.
(and before you crap on it, this is not the same as the original Bonsai, this newer one is much better, and upstream support in llama.cpp etc. is being worked on)
> Shrinks DeepSeek-V4-Flash from 76.87 GiB (which crashes in OOM on 64 GB Linux) down to 56.56 GiB
And later
> Standard IQ2_XXS (76.87 GiB, Unpatched)
Except unsloth’s IQ2_XXS GGUF is 91GB, even their smallest IQ1_S is 82.5GB. So I wonder which model/quant the number even refers to.
Also the mentions of “compression” and “MoE pruning” also make it sound lobotomized even more than unsloth’s IQ1 quants.
Also, just noticed that “moe pruning” likely means “the model is supposed to run 6(DS)/8(Qwen) experts per token per layer, but we only run 4 to save on time”.
Either way, the final gguf is 75% of the size of unsloth IQ1_S, which by itself should tell you a lot about its quality; they (somehow; I have no interest digging that info from that slop paper) shrink the (already IQ1) FFN weights, and shrink some attention weights from Q5 to Q2. I’m surprised it was even able to generate the text in the demo.
Reddit is flooded with these breathless headlines “xyz tokens/s on my light switch”. It’s always quantizations below 4 bits per weight. Mostly useless.