PETITION FOR QUANTIZATION AWARE TRAINING TO BE A NORM!!!

Reddit r/AI_Agents 09/02/26, 06:54 AM News

Summary

The post questions why quantization-aware training is not a standard practice for open-weight AI models and asks about potential barriers like compute costs or performance impacts.

I WONDER WHY QUANTIZATION AWARE TRAINING ISN'T A NORM YET!?? ESPECIALLY FOR MODELS LINED UP TO BE RELEASED AS OPEN WEIGHTS. Real talk, if a model's going open weight, we already know the community's gonna quant it to 4-bit same day so people can actually run it. So why not just bake that into training from the jump? QAT ain't new. But every release still drops in full precision like that's how most users gonna experience it. Is it extra compute cost during training? Does it hurt benchmark numbers? Or is the gain over post-training quant just not that serious? I'm asking genuinely, what's the catch? From outside it looks like free wins for the community, so what am I missing?

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