IDEA: Bitnet 1.58 (a4.8) version in future variants would be so incredible!

#23
by apiarium - opened

MiniMax-M3 is incredible — thanks for releasing the weights. Would the team consider releasing a BitNet 1.58 (a4.8) variant in a future update? For anyone unfamiliar: ternary weights {-1, 0, +1} at 1.58 bits/param plus 4-bit activations means matmul becomes pure integer addition, no floating-point multipliers needed. Microsoft's bitnet.cpp already runs a 100B BitNet model on a single CPU at reading speed (5–7 tok/s) with 2–6× speedups on consumer hardware. The BitNet 1.58 paper (arXiv:2402.17764) showed perplexity parity with FP16 at 7B scale, and the a4.8 paper (arXiv:2411.04965) pushed activations down further with minimal quality loss. Training recipe is public at microsoft/unilm. A BitNet-native MiniMax would run offline on ordinary laptops and phones — no GPU needed — which is exactly the kind of accessibility a model this good deserves. Just putting it out there!

It is a great model indeed, I am using it quite a bit, MiniMax-M2.7 is also pretty great at higher quant like Q8_0 (no vision capabilities though, which MiniMax-M3 addresses).

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