Comment by derefr
8 hours ago
Sounds like an approach that would also work for ML model weights files — just another kind of multidimensional array with metadata.
I wonder what exactly the big multi-model AI companies are doing to optimize model cold-start latency, and how much it just looks like Zarr on top of on-prem object storage.
People have literally used Zarr for this - at one point Gemini used Zarr for checkpointing model weights. Not sure what the current fashion in that space is though.
It's definitely one of many fields that see convergent evolution towards something that just looks like Zarr. In fact you can use VirtualiZarr to parse HuggingFace's "SafeTensors" format [0].
[0]: https://github.com/zarr-developers/VirtualiZarr/pull/555