Part 4/6:
The Transformers library provides built-in support for quantizing models, allowing you to easily load 8-bit or 4-bit versions of popular language models. For example, the 1 billion parameter LLaMA 3.2 model can be loaded in 8-bit or 4-bit quantized versions, reducing the file size from 4.9 GB to 1.5 GB or 1 GB, respectively. The VRAM requirements also drop from 5 GB to 1.7 GB or 1.2 GB.
When generating text with the quantized models, the output quality remains quite good, with only a slight increase in perplexity compared to the full-precision model.