GLM-5.3-Flash-VQ-2.7bpw

101.9 GiB — GLM-5.3-Flash on one 128 GB Mac.

A data-free vector-quantized build of GLM-5.3-Flash (598.5 GiB bf16, vision) for Apple Silicon. Stock mlx-vlm, no patches — the VQ runtime ships inside the checkpoint as model.py. Built with VQLab.

MoE experts at d=4/K=512 (9-bit packed codes), with eight expert layers promoted to d=4/K=2048 (11-bit) — layers 20, 27, 29, 31, 33, 34, 35, 39, chosen by measured single-layer effect. Attention, embeddings and the output head stay 8-bit affine; norms, routers and the full 347-tensor vision tower stay bf16.

The affine builds compared against below are our own conversions of the same base, made with the same tooling, scored on the same instrument.

Instead of rounding each weight onto a uniform grid the way affine quantization does, VQ stores small groups of weights as indices into codebooks fitted to the weights themselves — which is why it beats affine at matched bytes below 6 bits. The method and results are in our paper, Data-Free Vector Quantization Beats Affine Quantization at Matched Bytes Below 6 Bits (CC BY 4.0). This build goes beyond the published recipe: it mixes codebook sizes, promoting individual expert layers by measured effect (see How it was built).

Requirements

The glm5_next architecture ships in released mlx-vlm 0.6.17 — a normal pip install, not a fork or an unmerged PR. The VQ runtime needs no patches: it ships as model.py inside the checkpoint, declared via model_file in config.json, and resolves under both mlx-lm and mlx_vlm.

pip install 'mlx-vlm>=0.6.17'

Vision-ready: config.json carries vision_config and image_token_id, and the vision tower ships bf16. To serve across several Macs, see Run it.

Changelog

2026-10-01 — runtime refresh; Knurlogic

The bundled model.py is updated to the current VQ runtime; weights are unchanged. The run, multi-Mac, drafting and vision instructions now use Knurlogic.

2026-09-09 — runtime refresh

Runtime refresh. The bundled model.py is updated so downloaders run exactly the code that was benchmarked; dense bundles now carry both runtimes.

• Faster prefill on affected geometries, measured per rung: a device-codebook kernel arm for large-codebook geometries (up to 1.46x on affected rungs), a ragged-subvector relaxation (up to 1.34x on affected rungs), a fused d8 arm, and a routing memo (≈2%). No blanket speedup is claimed across the lineup — gains apply only where the geometry engages the new paths.
• Output quality is unchanged: the kernel changes are bit-identical or 1-ULP-equivalent, and the routing memo is bit-identical (logits checksum verified).
• Speculative decoding (MTP): on repos that ship mtp-head-q6.safetensors, the sidecar works with the exo fork branch mtp-stage1 (github.com/noahzelezny/exo) — launch each node with exo --mtp (or set EXO_MTP=1). Note: with MTP enabled, exo serves requests sequentially (the batch engine has no MTP path), so leave it off for concurrent / multi-agent workloads.

Measured results

Referee: 2048 tokens; prose = WikiText, code = public mlx corpus (pinned manifest), literary = Gutenberg. KL is against the bf16 teacher's cached top-64 logits (captured mass 0.9906 on every row). This model's row was measured on the published artifact itself, all three corpora, on the same interpreter as every comparator row (mlx 0.32.2 / mlx-vlm 0.6.17).

This is the fits-a-128 GB-Mac rung. Against affine q3 it is 27 GiB smaller and ≈22% better on KL (293.84 vs 377.08), with clear wins on prose and code; q3 edges it narrowly on literary (1.4731 vs 1.4811), the corpus this family memorized hardest, and the gap closes with bits — the 116 GiB rung wins literary outright. It is not q4-class: reaching q4 quality from this family costs 134 GiB (the d4/K8192 rung, which matches or beats affine q4 on every axis at 32 GiB less), and affine q4 itself is a 166 GiB download. At this rung's memory budget it is the best thing we have measured.

Rank these by KL, not perplexity. Perplexity is an aggregate over finite text and absorbs offsetting errors; KL measures distance to the teacher's distribution directly. KL here is prose-only (the teacher cache is a prose cache).

These perplexity scores aren't comparable across model families. The bf16 teacher has near-verbatim memorized the public corpora used here (mean top-1 probability 0.857 on prose, measured), so absolute perplexity for this family is contamination-dominated. KL to that teacher stays fully valid — a sharp teacher is harder to track.

Runtime

Speed on this revision (measured 2026-10-01)

Split across two Macs with Knurlogic (M3 Ultra 96 GB + M4 Max 128 GB, pipeline over Thunderbolt), against GLM-5.3-Flash-4bit on the same two Macs: 3 pairs, a prompt of about 1,900 tokens, 128 generated tokens, no drafting.

A two-Mac split's absolute speed depends on the link, so only the ratio is quoted.

Earlier figures (previous runtime)

Measured on a Mac Studio M4 128 GB, single box, warm (cold first cycles page badly at ≈101 GiB resident; discard one before benchmarking):

Memory

Process RSS sampled at 5 Hz from outside the process, M4 128 GB, single box:

• 61.1 GiB peak for load + 2048-token prefill + 128-token decode. Weights are memory-mapped, so RSS counts only pages actually touched — useful for comparing artifacts on the same instrument, not for capacity planning.
• ≈100.9 GiB sustained resident once routing has touched the experts; budget this. Trunk + MTP head is ≈107 GiB — it runs on a 128 GB box and is tight there; close memory-heavy applications.

Long-prompt peaks stay near resident: the bundled runtime caps MLX's buffer-reuse cache by default (VQLAB_CACHE_LIMIT_GB overrides, 0 disables), measured free on wall time. Measured under exo, a 26,423-token prompt through a 2-node pipeline held per-chunk transients under 2 GiB, flat across all 13 chunks. If you run your own serving loop, chunk the prefill (2048) and call mx.eval([c.state for c in cache]) plus mx.clear_cache() after every chunk — the chunk size only bounds the peak if each chunk is actually forced.

Run it

Requires a Mac with Apple Silicon (macOS, MLX).

With Knurlogic, which works out the settings and checks the model fits before loading it:

pip install knurlogic
hf download TheDrainFlorist/GLM-5.3-Flash-VQ-2.7bpw --local-dir ~/Knurlogic/Models/GLM-5.3-Flash-VQ-2.7bpw
knurlogic serve ~/Knurlogic/Models/GLM-5.3-Flash-VQ-2.7bpw

Chat at http://127.0.0.1:8080/, or point any OpenAI-, Anthropic- or Ollama-compatible client at it (model local). knurlogic ui opens a page with a Launch button for every model on disk instead.

At 116 GB on disk this needs a Mac with more memory than that, or two Macs: install the same Knurlogic version and the model on each, run knurlogic ui --host cluster on both, and launch it from the page with both machines selected. Knurlogic splits the layers between them.

Images work through Knurlogic directly; mlx-vlm is not needed.

The VQ runtime ships inside this repo as model.py (declared by model_file in config.json), and Knurlogic runs the file the model ships.

Without Knurlogic:

python -m mlx_vlm generate \
  --model TheDrainFlorist/GLM-5.3-Flash-VQ-2.7bpw \
  --prompt "Explain vector quantization briefly." \
  --max-tokens 512

Speculative decoding (MTP)

This repo includes mtp-head-q6.safetensors (6.09 GiB): GLM's own multi-token-prediction head — layers.45, 889 tensors, 13.84 GiB as a bf16 graft, packed to q6. It is never named in the weight index, so stock loaders ignore it entirely; it costs nothing unless you opt in by name.

When enabled it adds ≈6.3 GiB resident (head weights + its cache). Acceptance is ≈0.75, and the trunk verifies every drafted token by exact rejection sampling, so the output distribution is exactly the base model's. On a single box it does not make decoding faster — parity with plain decode out to ≈1000 generated tokens (20.0 vs 20.3 tok/s), drifting ≈15% behind by 2000. Where speculation pays is pipelined multi-node decoding (for the rungs of this family too large for one machine — see their cards). Knurlogic loads the shipped head and drafts automatically, on one Mac or split across several; there is nothing to enable. Cluster throughput varies with shard placement on mixed-generation hardware, so benchmark your own topology. On one 128 GB box, run this model plain (Knurlogic's lean preset turns MTP off).

Run the sidecar through vqlab serve (or vqlab mtp-generate), not your own loop. Verifying drafted tokens sends multi-token steps through GLM's attention, and the upstream fast path only handles single tokens — a 2-token verify falls off it and pays a measured 23x per-layer attention tax that grows with context. Every vqlab drafting entry point installs the fix (the fast path extended to short verify steps, numerically equivalent to within one bf16 ULP per layer).

To use it:

git clone https://github.com/noahzelezny/VQLab && cd VQLab
python3 -m venv .venv && source .venv/bin/activate
pip install .
python -m vqlab.cli serve \
  --model TheDrainFlorist/GLM-5.3-Flash-VQ-2.7bpw \
  --sidecar mtp-head-q6.safetensors

OpenAI-compatible API on localhost; vqlab mtp-generate for one-shot CLI use. Without --sidecar, nothing about the model changes.

The mtp-head-q6.safetensors files in our lineups (Qwen Flash 2.14 GiB, Qwen 397B 5.41 GiB, GLM 6.09 GiB) are different heads with different geometry and share only a filename — never cross-copy them between families.

Methodology

Fitted data-free from the bf16 checkpoint — k-means / Lloyd over weight subvectors, seed 1234, no Hessian, no activation statistics, no calibration corpus. The base is a uniform d=4/K=512 fit of the 42 expert layers (L3–L44; L45 is GLM's MTP layer and is never quantized), 98.55 GiB at 2.635 bpw. Eight expert layers are then promoted to d=4/K=2048 (+0.42 GiB each), giving the 101.93 GiB shipped size. Codes are packed sub-byte into uint32 words (9 bits at K=512, 11 at K=2048) with an fp16 scale per (row, 64 weights). The "2.7bpw" in the name is derived from the measured sizes; GiB is the measured quantity and is what the card quotes.

The eight promoted layers were chosen by measurement, not a heuristic: all 42 expert layers were promoted one at a time and scored on the assembled model, and the eight with the largest measured effect shipped. Targeting this way is 1.93x the efficiency of buying bits uniformly, capturing 37% of the full K512→K2048 step's gain for 19% of its bytes. Layer effects are base-specific and do not transfer to other rungs or families; the full sweep, the controls, and the probe it falsified are in the project ledger.

Verification

Release gates passed on this artifact before upload: file, index and tokenizer checks, a verbatim match between the bundled runtime and its source, and a generation smoke through the shipping runtime on Apple Silicon. The upload path runs the gate itself and refuses to publish without it.

Limitations

• This is the aggressive end of the ladder. Prose perplexity is 1.26x the teacher's. If you have the memory, the 134 GiB rung reaches q4-class quality (not yet published).
• q3 edges it on literary (1.4731 vs 1.4811) — the one axis where smaller-and-better does not hold. VQ damage lands hardest on the most memorized corpus, so test a literary-heavy workload yourself.
• Tight on 128 GB with the sidecar (≈107 GiB resident). Cold runs page; discard a cycle before benchmarking.
• MTP is single-box parity, not a speedup (19.99 vs 19.7 tok/s), and it must run through vqlab serve / mtp-generate — a homegrown verify loop makes it a net loss (see the MTP section).
• Decode small-M kernel behavior is a known open frontier for this lineup, not a property of the quantization quality.

Paper

The method, the full model ladder, the negative results, and the measurement rules behind every number here: Data-Free Vector Quantization Beats Affine Quantization at Matched Bytes Below 6 Bits (CC BY 4.0) · code: VQLab · web version: Space

Support this work

VQLab and these artifacts are built and released independently — the fits, the measurement harness and the published rungs are one person's compute and time. If they are useful to you:

• Sponsor: github.com/sponsors/noahzelezny
• Contract work: available for quantization and on-device inference work on Apple silicon — custom rungs, per-layer allocation for your model, or getting a checkpoint to run well on a Mac. Contact: hello@thedrainflorist.com

Provenance

Base model: zai-org/GLM-5.3-Flash — MIT licensed. This is a quantized derivative and inherits that license; using it means accepting the base model's terms. Quantization: TheDrainFlorist, 2026.

The upstream authors ask that their technical report be cited in research use:

@misc{glm5team2026glm5vibecodingagentic,
      title={GLM-5: from Vibe Coding to Agentic Engineering},
      author={GLM-5-Team and : and Aohan Zeng and Xin Lv and Zhenyu Hou and Zhengxiao Du and Qinkai Zheng and Bin Chen and Da Yin and Chendi Ge and Chenghua Huang and Chengxing Xie and Chenzheng Zhu and Congfeng Yin and Cunxiang Wang and Gengzheng Pan and Hao Zeng and Haoke Zhang and Haoran Wang and Huilong Chen and Jiajie Zhang and Jian Jiao and Jiaqi Guo and Jingsen Wang and Jingzhao Du and Jinzhu Wu and Kedong Wang and Lei Li and Lin Fan and Lucen Zhong and Mingdao Liu and Mingming Zhao and Pengfan Du and Qian Dong and Rui Lu and Shuang-Li and Shulin Cao and Song Liu and Ting Jiang and Xiaodong Chen and Xiaohan Zhang and Xuancheng Huang and Xuezhen Dong and Yabo Xu and Yao Wei and Yifan An and Yilin Niu and Yitong Zhu and Yuanhao Wen and Yukuo Cen and Yushi Bai and Zhongpei Qiao and Zihan Wang and Zikang Wang and Zilin Zhu and Ziqiang Liu and Zixuan Li and Bojie Wang and Bosi Wen and Can Huang and Changpeng Cai and Chao Yu and Chen Li and Chengwei Hu and Chenhui Zhang and Dan Zhang and Daoyan Lin and Dayong Yang and Di Wang and Ding Ai and Erle Zhu and Fangzhou Yi and Feiyu Chen and Guohong Wen and Hailong Sun and Haisha Zhao and Haiyi Hu and Hanchen Zhang and Hanrui Liu and Hanyu Zhang and Hao Peng and Hao Tai and Haobo Zhang and He Liu and Hongwei Wang and Hongxi Yan and Hongyu Ge and Huan Liu and Huanpeng Chu and Jia'ni Zhao and Jiachen Wang and Jiajing Zhao and Jiamin Ren and Jiapeng Wang and Jiaxin Zhang and Jiayi Gui and Jiayue Zhao and Jijie Li and Jing An and Jing Li and Jingwei Yuan and Jinhua Du and Jinxin Liu and Junkai Zhi and Junwen Duan and Kaiyue Zhou and Kangjian Wei and Ke Wang and Keyun Luo and Laiqiang Zhang and Leigang Sha and Liang Xu and Lindong Wu and Lintao Ding and Lu Chen and Minghao Li and Nianyi Lin and Pan Ta and Qiang Zou and Rongjun Song and Ruiqi Yang and Shangqing Tu and Shangtong Yang and Shaoxiang Wu and Shengyan Zhang and Shijie Li and Shuang Li and Shuyi Fan and Wei Qin and Wei Tian and Weining Zhang and Wenbo Yu and Wenjie Liang and Xiang Kuang and Xiangmeng Cheng and Xiangyang Li and Xiaoquan Yan and Xiaowei Hu and Xiaoying Ling and Xing Fan and Xingye Xia and Xinyuan Zhang and Xinze Zhang and Xirui Pan and Xu Zou and Xunkai Zhang and Yadi Liu and Yandong Wu and Yanfu Li and Yidong Wang and Yifan Zhu and Yijun Tan and Yilin Zhou and Yiming Pan and Ying Zhang and Yinpei Su and Yipeng Geng and Yong Yan and Yonglin Tan and Yuean Bi and Yuhan Shen and Yuhao Yang and Yujiang Li and Yunan Liu and Yunqing Wang and Yuntao Li and Yurong Wu and Yutao Zhang and Yuxi Duan and Yuxuan Zhang and Zezhen Liu and Zhengtao Jiang and Zhenhe Yan and Zheyu Zhang and Zhixiang Wei and Zhuo Chen and Zhuoer Feng and Zijun Yao and Ziwei Chai and Ziyuan Wang and Zuzhou Zhang and Bin Xu and Minlie Huang and Hongning Wang and Juanzi Li and Yuxiao Dong and Jie Tang},
      year={2026},
      eprint={2602.15763},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.LG},
      url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.15763},
}

Local artifact: glm53_vq_packed_mix_best8.

Built with MLX and VQLab.