> Are the weights encoded on every startup?
Not really, that code only runs while importing the PyTorch format. See readme for the frontend app: https://github.com/Const-me/Cgml/tree/master/Mistral/Mistral... When loading the model from *.cgml, the model file already contains compressed tensors. That’s how that file is only 4.55 GB, versus 13.4 GB in the original model.
> was that really needed?
For desktops with many CPU cores, a simpler scalar version would probably work equally well. Still, low-end computers don’t always have many cores to use by these background encoding tasks. Also, CPU usage on laptops translates to battery drain.
To go on a tangent, I note your custom 'BCML1' 5bit per weight compression codec and your optimised hand-coded AVX2 to encode it... was that really needed? Are the weights encoded on every startup? Why not do it once and save to disk?