What is a .GGUF file?
GGUF is how llama.cpp ships a language model as one portable file: a self-describing header of key/value metadata - architecture, context length, tokenizer, chat template - followed by the tensors, usually quantised down from 16 bits to four or five.
- Did you know
- Dividing a GGUF’s size by its parameter count gives the bytes per parameter, and multiplying that by eight gives the bits per parameter - the most honest single number for how hard a model has been squeezed.
- GGUF stands for GGML Universal File and packs weights plus structured key-value metadata into one self-contained file.
- It was designed as an extensible, backward-compatible successor to the older GGML format.
- What Analyser shows you
- Open machine-learning models and read what is actually in them. ONNX models and frozen TensorFlow graphs are drawn as a graph: every operation as a box, every tensor flowing between them as a line, laid out left to right by depth so parallel branches sit side by side. Neither format stores the connections - a node follows another because one of its inputs is one of the other's outputs - so the edges are recovered by matching those names. Alongside the picture: the operation mix that fingerprints the architecture, the input and output shapes (including the dynamic ones a model leaves open), every weight tensor with its shape, and the total parameter count. Weight files are read too - Safetensors and GGUF give up their full tensor list, precision and parameter count, and a GGUF also declares its architecture, context length and quantisation. A PyTorch checkpoint is a Python pickle, which is a program rather than a document, so nothing in it is ever run: the opcodes are read as bytes and every module it would import is listed, with anything a file of numbers has no business touching flagged. Keras models have their layer list read from the architecture JSON.
- Open a .GGUF file
- Drag a .GGUF file onto the Analyser home page (or tap to pick one). It opens entirely in your browser - nothing is uploaded, there is no account, and it works offline once installed.