What's in a GGUF, besides the weights – and what's still missing?

Funny, to me AI models have "always" been single files, as that's what has been the norm in the local image gen business. Safetensors files allow stuffing all kinds of stuff inside them too, no GGUF needed for that. Though given that the text encoders of modern models are multi-gigabyte language models themselves, nobody includes redundant copies of those in every checkpoint.

As someone who is tinkering with a desktop-based inference app in FLTK[0], i wish this used the actual Jinja2 template parser llama.cpp uses (or there was another C function that did that since AFAICT for "proper" parsing you need to be able to pass a bunch of data to the template so it knows if you, e.g., do tool calling). Currently i'm using this adhocky function, but i guess i'll either write a Jinja2 interpreter or copy/paste the one from llama.cpp's code (depending on how i feel at the time :-P).

But yeah, GGUF's "all-in-one" approach is very convenient. And i agree that it feels odd to have the projection models as separate files - i remember when i first download a vision-capable model, i just grabbed whatever GGUF looked appropriate, then llama.cpp told me it couldn't do model and took me a bit to realize that i had to download an extra file. Literally my thought once i did was "wasn't GGUF supposed to contain everything?" :-P

[0] https://i.imgur.com/GiTBE1j.png

hmmm...