IBM Granite 4.1 3B quantized variants show no quality gradient in informal SVG benchmark

IBM's recently released Granite 4.1 family (3B, 8B, 30B; Apache 2.0) prompted Unsloth to publish 21 GGUF-quantized variants of the 3B model, ranging from 1.2 GB to 6.34 GB. Developer Simon Willison ran the same creative SVG prompt — 'Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle' — across all 21 files to probe whether model size within a quantization ladder produces meaningfully different outputs.

The result was a clean null: Willison found no distinguishable quality pattern correlating with quantization level, describing all outputs as 'pretty terrible.' While the experiment is informal and limited to one creative task, the finding is a useful practitioner caution against assuming that heavier quantized weights of a weak base model will yield better creative or visual-generation results. Willison noted he plans to repeat the test with a model that handles the task better.