Selecting the correct model format depends on your hardware capabilities and memory constraints.
BF16 (Brain Float 16) – Use if BF16 acceleration is available
A 16-bit floating-point format designed for faster computation while retaining good precision.
Provides similar dynamic range as FP32 but with lower memory usage.
Recommended if your hardware supports BF16 acceleration (check your device's specs).
Ideal for high-performance inference with reduced memory footprint compared to FP32.
📌 Use BF16 if:
✔ Your hardware has native BF16 support (e.g., newer GPUs, TPUs).
✔ You want higher precision while saving memory.
✔ You plan to requantize the model into another format.
📌 Avoid BF16 if:
❌ Your hardware does not support BF16 (it may fall back to FP32 and run slower).
❌ You need compatibility with older devices that lack BF16 optimization.
F16 (Float 16) – More widely supported than BF16
A 16-bit floating-point high precision but with less of range of values than BF16.
Works on most devices with FP16 acceleration support (including many GPUs and some CPUs).
Slightly lower numerical precision than BF16 but generally sufficient for inference.
📌 Use F16 if:
✔ Your hardware supports FP16 but not BF16.
✔ You need a balance between speed, memory usage, and accuracy.
✔ You are running on a GPU or another device optimized for FP16 computations.
📌 Avoid F16 if:
❌ Your device lacks native FP16 support (it may run slower than expected).
❌ You have memory limitations.
Quantized Models (Q4_K, Q6_K, Q8, etc.) – For CPU & Low-VRAM Inference
Quantization reduces model size and memory usage while maintaining as much accuracy as possible.
Lower-bit models (Q4_K) → Best for minimal memory usage, may have lower precision.
Higher-bit models (Q6_K, Q8_0) → Better accuracy, requires more memory.
📌 Use Quantized Models if:
✔ You are running inference on a CPU and need an optimized model.
✔ Your device has low VRAM and cannot load full-precision models.
✔ You want to reduce memory footprint while keeping reasonable accuracy.
📌 Avoid Quantized Models if:
❌ You need maximum accuracy (full-precision models are better for this).
❌ Your hardware has enough VRAM for higher-precision formats (BF16/F16).
Very Low-Bit Quantization (IQ3_XS, IQ3_S, IQ3_M, Q4_K, Q4_0)
These models are optimized for extreme memory efficiency, making them ideal for low-power devices or large-scale deployments where memory is a critical constraint.
IQ3_XS: Ultra-low-bit quantization (3-bit) with extreme memory efficiency.
Use case: Best for ultra-low-memory devices where even Q4_K is too large.
Trade-off: Lower accuracy compared to higher-bit quantizations.
IQ3_S: Small block size for maximum memory efficiency.
Use case: Best for low-memory devices where IQ3_XS is too aggressive.
IQ3_M: Medium block size for better accuracy than IQ3_S.
Use case: Suitable for low-memory devices where IQ3_S is too limiting.
Q4_K: 4-bit quantization with block-wise optimization for better accuracy.
Use case: Best for low-memory devices where Q6_K is too large.
Q4_0: Pure 4-bit quantization, optimized for ARM devices.
Use case: Best for ARM-based devices or low-memory environments.
Pure Q4_0 quantization, optimized for ARM devices.
Best for low-memory environments.
Prefer IQ4_NL for better accuracy.
🚀 If you find these models useful
❤ Please click "Like" if you find this useful!
Help me test my AI-Powered Network Monitor Assistant with quantum-ready security checks:
👉 Quantum Network Monitor
💬 How to test:
Click the chat icon (bottom right on any page)
Choose an AI assistant type:
TurboLLM (GPT-4-mini)
FreeLLM (Open-source)
TestLLM (Experimental CPU-only)
What I’m Testing
I’m pushing the limits of small open-source models for AI network monitoring, specifically:
Function calling against live network services
How small can a model go while still handling:
Automated Nmap scans
Quantum-readiness checks
Metasploit integration
🟡 TestLLM – Current experimental model (llama.cpp on 6 CPU threads):
✅ Zero-configuration setup
⏳ 30s load time (slow inference but no API costs)
🔧 Help wanted! If you’re into edge-device AI, let’s collaborate!
"Check if my server is using quantum safe encyption for communication"
"Run a quick Nmap vulnerability test"
'"Create a cmd processor to .. (what ever you want)" Note you need to install a Quantum Network Monitor Agent to run the .net code from. This is a very flexible and powerful feature. Use with caution!
Final word
I fund the servers to create the models files, run the Quantum Network Monitor Service and Pay for Inference from Novita and OpenAI all from my own pocket. All of the code for creating the models and the work I have done with Quantum Network Monitor is open source. Feel free to use what you find useful. Please support my work and consider buying me a coffee .
This will help me pay for the services and increase the token limits for everyone.
Thank you :)
Model Information
We introduce Nemotron-UltraLong-8B, a series of ultra-long context language models designed to process extensive sequences of text (up to 1M, 2M, and 4M tokens) while maintaining competitive performance on standard benchmarks. Built on the Llama-3.1, UltraLong-8B leverages a systematic training recipe that combines efficient continued pretraining with instruction tuning to enhance long-context understanding and instruction-following capabilities. This approach enables our models to efficiently scale their context windows without sacrificing general performance.
Starting with transformers >= 4.43.0 onward, you can run conversational inference using the Transformers pipeline abstraction or by leveraging the Auto classes with the generate() function.
Make sure to update your transformers installation via pip install --upgrade transformers.
python
1import transformers
2import torch
34model_id ="nvidia/Llama-3.1-Nemotron-8B-UltraLong-4M-Instruct"56pipeline = transformers.pipeline(7"text-generation",8 model=model_id,9 model_kwargs={"torch_dtype": torch.bfloat16},10 device_map="auto",11)1213messages =[14{"role":"system","content":"You are a pirate chatbot who always responds in pirate speak!"},15{"role":"user","content":"Who are you?"},16]1718outputs = pipeline(19 messages,20 max_new_tokens=256,21)22print(outputs[0]["generated_text"][-1])
Continued Pretraining: The training data consists of 1B tokens sourced from a pretraining corpus using per-domain upsampling based on sample length. The model was trained for 150 iterations with a sequence length of 4M and a global batch size of 2.
Supervised fine-tuning (SFT): 1B tokens on open-source instruction datasets across general, mathematics, and code domains. We subsample the data from the ‘general_sft_stage2’ from AceMath-Instruct.
Maximum context window: 4M tokens
Evaluation Results
We evaluate Nemotron-UltraLong-8B on a diverse set of benchmarks, including long-context tasks (e.g., RULER, LV-Eval, and InfiniteBench) and standard tasks (e.g., MMLU, MATH, GSM-8K, and HumanEval). UltraLong-8B achieves superior performance on ultra-long context tasks while maintaining competitive results on standard benchmarks.
@article{ulralong2025,
title={From 128K to 4M: Efficient Training of Ultra-Long Context Large Language Models},
author={Xu, Chejian and Ping, Wei and Xu, Peng and Liu, Zihan and Wang, Boxin and Shoeybi, Mohammad and Catanzaro, Bryan},
journal={arXiv preprint},
year={2025}
}