There are a very large number of quantization schemes in existence, definitely not just one, & they all have potentially very different ideas and schemes.

LLM8 was introduced before https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.07339 of the same first and last author as QLora & is still what can be used in Huggingface Transformers with the `load_in_8bits` parameter.

The idea was just to quantize all weights to 8 bits except a few outliers, which are kept in original precision. This scheme kept the computations extremely accurate, and was really fast to do.

I haven't read the new paper, but I assume they came up with a more advanced fast distributional setup.