Open Source LLM details

Question 1

What is safetensors?

Answer 1

a file format that safely stores tensors

Question 2

Speed of safetensors vs .ckpt?

Answer 2

some people say safetensors is faster

Question 3

what is (/was) pre july 2023 the standard way to save PyTorch models when using the Hugging Face Transformers library?

Answer 3

pytorch_model.bin

Question 4

how much faster is safetensors.torch.load_file than torch.load_file

Answer 4

76x on CPU and 2x on GPU

Question 5

how does pytorch transform its models to/from disk?

Answer 5

well it writes the raw bytes of the tensors to disk and then uses pickle to serialize/deserialize other metadata/Python Object data

Question 6

difference between GGUF and safetensors

Answer 6

safetensors can only be run on GPU