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Your serving team does not own pretraining. When is quantization-aware training worth it over post-training quantization?

QAT never makes a model faster than PTQ at the same format; both produce identical tensors for the kernel. The answer reframes what QAT buys, prices a QAT run in GPU hours against the fleet it could shrink, and names the cases where a serving team should not touch it.

Updated Oct 2026 · Worked answers on inference mechanisms, with calculations, implementation details, and follow-up questions.

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