Model Quantization
Deploying models that are performant (obviously statistically but in this context I primarily mean computationally) is challenging when you are working with large models such as BERT etc.
Quantization
Quantization involves compressing model weights into smaller, more efficient representations. Weights are normally stored as 32 bit floating point numbers but they can be compressed into 8 bit integers with a very small amount of performance loss.
This article talks about how to do quantization effectively (mirror).