Analysis Whether or not OpenAI's new open weights models are any good is still up for debate, but their use of a relatively new data type called MXFP4 is arguably more important, especially if it ...

AI is all about data, and the representation of the data matters strongly. But after focusing primarily on 8-bit integers and 32‑bit floating-point numbers, the industry is now looking at new formats.

The new Half type is composed of 16 bits and will be geared towards speeding up machine learning workflows by enabling faster computation and smaller storage requirements at the expense of precision.