## [A popular technique to make AI more efficient has drawbacks](https://techcrunch.com/2024/11/17/a-popular-technique-to-make-ai-more-efficient-has-drawbacks/)

One of the most widely used techniques to make AI models more efficient, quantization, has limits — and the industry could be fast approaching them.

In the context of AI, quantization refers to lowering the number of bits — the smallest units a computer can process — needed to represent information. Consider this analogy: When someone asks the time, you’d probably say “noon” — not “oh twelve hundred, one second, and four milliseconds.” That’s quantizing; both answers are correct, but one is slightly more precise. How much precision you actually need depends on the context.

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