GGUF, the long way around (via) Vicki Boykis dives deep into the GGUF format used by llama.cpp, after starting with a detailed description of how PyTorch models work and how they are traditionally persisted using Python pickle.
Pickle lead to safetensors, a format that avoided the security problems with downloading and running untrusted pickle files.
Llama.cpp introduced GGML, which popularized 16-bit (as opposed to 32-bit) quantization and bundled metadata and tensor data in a single file.
GGUF fixed some design flaws in GGML and is the default format used by Llama.cpp today.
Recent articles
- Putting Gemini 2.5 Pro through its paces - 25th March 2025
- New audio models from OpenAI, but how much can we rely on them? - 20th March 2025
- Calling a wrap on my weeknotes - 20th March 2025