peasantsmith/Qwen3.8-Flash-Next-PS-IQ2_XXS-GGUF
Qwen3.8-Flash-Next PS-IQ2_XXS (Peasant Smith)
176.9B parameters in a single 75.2 GB file — 3.40 bits/param. An IQ2_XXS-class GGUF of Qwen3.8-Flash-Next, built from the original Qwen/Qwen3.8-Flash-Next BF16 weights, with every component quantized to the precision it needs instead of crushed flat.
Please read: After running it for days non-stop I have concluded that this quantization is pretty good, but it does require certain care. I recommend running it with Thinking: Disabled or Low. You can definitely use xHigh or Medium, but I won't recommend them on hours of uninterrupted agentic work since you may risk loops or simply wasting time on overthinking. For short/medium tasks using thinking as xHigh is completely fine.
How the size was won
The model's single largest component is a per-layer-embedding (PLE) n-gram table: 51.2B params (~102 GB in BF16) — roughly 28% of the model. A naive 2-bit quant crushes it along with everything else, making the model's biggest component its weakest. This build takes the 2-bit win where it's safe and holds the PLE table at the quality floor the ecosystem agrees on:
- Expert down-projections sit a full step above gate/up (Q40 vs IQ2XXS): their errors land directly and additively on the residual stream, while gate/up errors pass through activations first.
- Every router, norm, bias, and hash-constant tensor stays F32 — the parts that must stay high precision aren't compressed at all.
- Imatrix: unsloth's published importance matrix for this model, audited to cover every quantized tensor (hyper-connection and PLE tensors pinned out of IQ quantization).
Testing
Honesty note: PPL was not run — at this weight class the BF16 reference does not fit the same GPU stack, so no comparable baseline exists on this hardware. The task battery above is the quality evidence; 2-bit experts do carry a real quality delta vs BF16 by construction.
Files
Usage
Generic llama.cpp invocation — tune the two offload values to your own hardware:
llama-server \
-m Qwen3.8-Flash-Next-IQ2_XXS.gguf \
--mmproj mmproj-Qwen3.8-Flash-Next-F16.gguf \
-ngl <layers that fit your VRAM> \
--n-cpu-moe <experts to spill to CPU RAM if VRAM is tight> \
--jinjaThe model ships its chat template (--jinja). Requires a recent llama.cpp with qwen4exp architecture support.
Provenance & credits
Qwen/Qwen3.8-Flash-Next— official BF16 safetensors, original weights (no third-party quant or modified repo as source). Model credit: Qwen.- → GGUF master via llama.cpp
convert_hf_to_gguf.py - →
llama-quantizeimportance-matrix quant with the per-component split above. Imatrix credit: unsloth.
Verify
SHA-256 (text): 2e0f14e7eeddce8f80fc88cf96a9cc641b4f60549318fb53e30af85649883586 SHA-256 (vision): f5f125bdfa3997011693e7fe59fae1a5c068c40a627a0576d72734a9cdab9691
Limitations
- 2-bit experts: a real quality delta vs BF16 exists by construction — the task battery passed, but long-tail knowledge degradation is expected at this footprint
- Text model only: the vision tower ships as the separate F16
mmprojfile - Requires a recent llama.cpp (qwen4exp architecture support)
- MTP head not embedded — left as shipped by Qwen
