Smaller Quants May Be Slower in Practice: Longer Thinking Cancels Speed Gains
Banana-Negra · reddit · 2026-10-22
A r/LocalLLaMA user argues that dropping to smaller quantized models can backfire: lower quants tend to produce longer thinking blocks, canceling out or even reversing the token-generation speed advantage, especially in agentic loops with multiple tool calls. The author hasn't systematically tested this on Qwen3.8 Flash Next with MTP and GLM 5.3 Flash yet and is gathering other users' impressions. Takeaway: just use the largest quant your hardware fits.
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