A r/LocalLLaMA user questions whether BitNet and ternary LLMs were a dead end after earlier promise around efficient low-bit models. The post notes that the largest ternary model appears to remain around 2B parameters. It asks why frontier open-weight AI labs are not visibly pursuing the approach, but provides no technical evidence or definitive answer.
The deployment of large language models (LLMs) has long faced a dual bottleneck of VRAM capacity and memory bandwidth. Microsoft previously introduced the…