GGUF 2.0 Specification Released, Addressing Quantization Artifacts in Small Models

The llama.cpp maintainer community has finalized GGUF 2.0, a new model storage and quantization format specification introducing structured metadata schemas, improved 4-bit and 3-bit quantization with lower perplexity degradation, and backwards-compatible streaming inference improvements. The format significantly reduces quality loss on models under 7B parameters, historically problematic for aggressive quantization. Major inference runtimes including Ollama and llama.cpp support the format in their latest releases.