Exactly! If you only want to use a Large Language Model (LLM) to run your own local chatbot, then using a quantized version will dramatically improve speed and performance. It also allows consumer hardware to run larger models which would otherwise be prohibitively resource intensive.

Here’s the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:

Quantization, in mathematics and digital signal processing, is the process of mapping input values from a large set (often a continuous set) to output values in a (countable) smaller set, often with a finite number of elements. Rounding and truncation are typical examples of quantization processes. Quantization is involved to some degree in nearly all digital signal processing, as the process of representing a signal in digital form ordinarily involves rounding. Quantization also forms the core of essentially all lossy compression algorithms. The difference between an input value and its quantized value (such as round-off error) is referred to as quantization error.

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Ah, thanks! I’m only familiar with the word in other contexts so it made a lot of noise.