Asad-Ismail/ternary-models

Asad-Ismail/ternary-models is currently a day-old repository with zero stars and forks, indicating it is in the very earliest stages of development or a personal experiment. While the stated goal—bringing ternary quantization (pioneered by Microsoft's BitNet b1.58) to multimodal models—is technically relevant, the project lacks a structural moat. The 'GGUF can't touch' claim refers to the current limitations of the llama.cpp ecosystem in handling non-text ternary architectures, but this is a temporary window. Frontier labs and major open-source contributors (like the Georgi Gerganov team or Hugging Face) are actively working on standardizing sub-2-bit quantization across all modalities. The project's defensibility is low because the core innovation (ternary weights) is driven by Microsoft Research, and the 'implementation' is likely a wrapper or a specific fine-tuning recipe that can be easily absorbed into more established libraries like Unsloth, AutoGPTQ, or llama.cpp itself once the kernels are stabilized. Without custom, high-performance Triton or CUDA kernels that provide a 10x lead over standard implementations, this repo functions primarily as a niche collection of weights rather than a defensible software platform.