“This idea is not new and Snowflake is certainly not the first to illustrate its value, of course. SAP, for example, introduced this idea with its model plug-in, Finch, earlier in 2024,” said Bradley Shimmin, chief analyst at Omdia.
However, despite Snowflake’s claims of minimal accuracy loss of SwiftKV-optimized LLMs, Shimmin warned that there could be tradeoffs in terms of how complex they are to implement, how much they degrade capability, and how compatible they are with the underlying inferencing architecture.
“Methods like quantization are super-popular because they do not impose that many tradeoffs. So, if customers find this technique from Snowflake to be of similar value, I imagine they will use it perhaps even alongside other techniques as required by whatever project they have at hand,” Shimmin explained.
