Huawei releases MACaQ, its internal quantizer for local inference (github.com)

120 points by thefox96 17 hours ago

29 comments:

by lukasc-ch 14 hours ago

People are reproducing it and creating GGUFs https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/s/36atJ2nNjh

by adrian_b 5 minutes ago

The results shown there are very good, much better than for the previously widely used quantizers.

Nice for Huawei to share it.

by Schlagbohrer 2 hours ago

The top 3 repos sorted by stars on Huawei's github page are all for quantization. I am not an LLM scientist so I can't tell what the difference is between them, or why they need three different pipelines for model quantization.

by xpil11 a minute ago

SINQ was created last year. It was for weights only and it was calibration-free quantization. Then KVarN is for KV-cache quantization to get longer context. MACaQ is multimodal, activation and weights calibrated quantization. 3 different projects

by Rabbit504030201 16 hours ago

https://huawei-csl.com/blog/macaq/

Why does some HN users seem to prefer GitHub page whenever available at expense of official site? I mean, Huawei is still sanctioned, anything they host third party outside China can disappear at any hour.

by nout 15 hours ago

I prefer GitHub, because I can see the code and immediately know where to click. Product pages are always full of various marketing shots, videos, etc that just takes more time to parse through.

by gt0 12 hours ago

This is pretty much the reason that if I read about a new product, I generally just go to the Wikipedia page. I just want the no-bullshit version, no "Say hello to blah" video or marketing word salad.

by andsoitis 9 hours ago

In this particular case I think you'd be pleased with it https://huawei-csl.com/blog/macaq/

It is from their lab in Switzerland, after all.

by lukasc-ch 14 hours ago

Looks like many of their repos there have been around for a while. Also not sure why we would sanction free stuff from them

by skinfaxi 11 hours ago

Well I'm not a lawyer but are you allowed to provide material support to sanctioned entities?

by sroussey 10 hours ago

It’s a commerce department sanction not a treasury department sanction (which would be far more serious).

by mocchibird 16 hours ago

Did they release any model? Seems good for Strata

by minraws 9 hours ago

Qwen 3.8 27B has a macaq quant available

by utternerd 16 hours ago

What a project name.

by QuantumNomad_ 16 hours ago

Probably intended to reference macaque monkeys.

by keyle 15 hours ago

I forgot my French, but isn't it incredibly rude?

by PorciiVorbesc 15 hours ago

Why?

by dmonitor 15 hours ago

I think the immature commenters are referring to the pronunciation being similar to "my cock"

by PorciiVorbesc 15 hours ago

Aaa, thanks I didn't think of that.

by arcanemachiner 13 hours ago

Congratulations on not being a total degenerate.

by stdbrouw 14 hours ago

It's also a racial slur in certain languages.

by yonatan8070 4 hours ago

It's also "Roach" in Hebrew (מקק)

by onemoresoop 5 hours ago

What are those?

by keyle 13 hours ago

No, no, not that.

by IsTom 14 hours ago

I'd assume the French know something about naming projects in the vein of Coq.

by 0xb0565e486 16 hours ago

xD

by wolrah 2 minutes ago

First thing my mind went to.

"Huawei releases MACaQ"

"Just like Jensen released his..."

by adrian_b 15 hours ago

I do not think that macaques would mind.

by ebx 15 hours ago

Just enough plausible deniability :P

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