Cambridge Mofang Notes

Sep 3, 2026 · Artificial Intelligence

AI Model Types, Quantization & File Formats: A Complete Guide

This article explains the four key dimensions of AI models—purpose, modality, quantization, and file format—covering model categories like LLMs, vision, audio, embedding, and reranker models, multimodal concepts, quantization trade-offs (FP16, Q4, Q8), and formats such as Safetensors, GGUF, and ONNX, with a practical checklist for model selection.