{"id":565912,"date":"2026-03-26T16:07:21","date_gmt":"2026-03-26T16:07:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/565912\/"},"modified":"2026-03-26T16:07:21","modified_gmt":"2026-03-26T16:07:21","slug":"googles-turboquant-ai-compression-algorithm-can-reduce-llm-memory-usage-by-6x","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/565912\/","title":{"rendered":"Google&#8217;s TurboQuant AI-compression algorithm can reduce LLM memory usage by 6x"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Even if you don\u2019t know much about the inner workings of generative AI models, you probably know they need a lot of memory. Hence, it is currently almost impossible to buy a measly stick of RAM <a href=\"https:\/\/arstechnica.com\/gadgets\/2025\/12\/for-just-a-couple-of-months-in-the-middle-of-2025-it-was-an-ok-time-to-build-a-pc\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">without getting fleeced<\/a>. Google Research recently <a href=\"https:\/\/research.google\/blog\/turboquant-redefining-ai-efficiency-with-extreme-compression\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">revealed TurboQuant<\/a>, a compression algorithm that reduces the memory footprint of large language models (LLMs) while also boosting speed and maintaining accuracy.<\/p>\n<p>TurboQuant is aimed at reducing the size of the key-value cache, which Google likens to a \u201cdigital cheat sheet\u201d that stores important information so it doesn\u2019t have to be recomputed. This cheat sheet is necessary because, as we say all the time, LLMs don\u2019t actually know anything; they can do a good impression of knowing things through the use of vectors, which map the semantic meaning of tokenized text. When two vectors are similar, that means they have conceptual similarity.<\/p>\n<p>High-dimensional vectors, which can have hundreds or thousands of embeddings, may describe complex information like the pixels in an image or a large data set. They also occupy a lot of memory and inflate the size of the key-value cache, bottlenecking performance. To make models smaller and more efficient, developers employ quantization techniques to <a href=\"https:\/\/arstechnica.com\/gadgets\/2025\/12\/the-npu-in-your-phone-keeps-improving-why-isnt-that-making-ai-better\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">run them at lower precision<\/a>. The drawback is that the outputs get worse\u2014the quality of token estimation goes down. With TurboQuant, Google\u2019s early results show an 8x performance increase and 6x reduction in memory usage in some tests without a loss of quality.<\/p>\n<p>Angles and errors<\/p>\n<p>Applying TurboQuant to an AI model is a two-step process. To achieve high-quality compression, Google has devised a system called PolarQuant. Usually, vectors in AI models are encoded using standard XYZ coordinates, but PolarQuant converts vectors into polar coordinates in a Cartesian system. On this circular grid, the vectors are reduced to two pieces of information: a radius (core data strength) and a direction (the data\u2019s meaning).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Even if you don\u2019t know much about the inner workings of generative AI models, you probably know they&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":565913,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,63,105],"class_list":{"0":"post-565912","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-au","12":"tag-australia","13":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/565912","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=565912"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/565912\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/565913"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=565912"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=565912"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=565912"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}