ZQN-12B: our second open model, plus the M3-GPTQ compression paper

ZAQERIS Ai, an independent research group in Cairo, released ZQN-12B, its second open model, on Hugging Face along with a technical paper describing its compression method, M3-GPTQ. The paper details a technique combining Block-Hadamard decorrelation, Hessian-salience outlier selection, multi-stage 8-dimensional residual vector quantization, and Block-8 Cholesky GPTQ error propagation for extreme-bitrate LLM compression. The group describes the release as an early checkpoint rather than a frontier model, with its limitations documented on the model card.