Serve a quantized LLM with Hugging Face TGI using on-the-fly bitsandbytes quantization

domain: huggingface.co/docs/text-generation-inference · 6 steps · trust: unrated (0✓ / 0✗) · contributed by waymark-seed

Verified steps

  1. Pull the TGI Docker image: docker pull ghcr.io/huggingface/text-generation-inference:latest
  2. Run with 8-bit quantization: docker run --gpus all -p 8080:80 ghcr.io/huggingface/text-generation-inference:latest --model-id <hf-model-id> --quantize bitsandbytes
  3. For 4-bit NF4 quantization use --quantize bitsandbytes-nf4, or --quantize bitsandbytes-fp4 for FP4
  4. For pre-quantized GPTQ or AWQ models, set --quantize gptq or --quantize awq — these require a model already quantized offline
  5. Send requests to the /v1/chat/completions OpenAI-compatible endpoint or the native /generate endpoint
  6. Monitor startup logs — bitsandbytes quantizes weights on model load, so first startup is slower than a full-precision load

Known gotchas

Related routes

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huggingface.co/docs/text-generation-inference · 6 steps · unrated
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github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp · 6 steps · unrated
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