SWAN for Enterprise: Deploying Frontier AI Without the GPU Bill

What if you could deploy the world's most powerful open-source AI models on commodity hardware, without specialised data scientists, GPU clusters, or ongoing cloud compute bills? SWAN makes this possible today.

The Enterprise AI Deployment Problem

Every enterprise pursuing AI faces the same fundamental tension: the most capable models are too large to deploy efficiently, and the methods to compress them are too complex and resource-intensive for most teams.

Today's state-of-the-art open-source models — with hundreds of billions of parameters — deliver remarkable reasoning, coding, and analytical capabilities. But deploying them requires:

What SWAN Solves for Enterprise

1. Eliminate Calibration Data Dependencies

Traditional quantization methods require "calibration data" — representative samples of the inputs the model will process. For enterprises, this creates real obstacles:

• Legal and compliance teams must approve using production data for model calibration
• Domain-specific data may not exist in sufficient quantity (medical, legal, financial)
• The calibration distribution may not match deployment reality, creating silent accuracy degradation
• Data preparation and validation requires specialised ML engineering time

SWAN eliminates this entirely. It analyses the mathematical properties of each weight tensor directly — no input data, no gradients, no forward passes through the model. The quantization decisions are based on the model's internal structure, not on any external dataset.

2. Reduce Infrastructure Costs Dramatically

Consider the economics of deploying a 400B parameter model:

A Mac Studio with 512 GB unified memory is a one-time purchase. There are no hourly compute charges, no data egress fees, no cloud subscription to manage. For organisations running AI inference continuously, the cost savings compound rapidly.

3. Enable True Data Sovereignty

For regulated industries — healthcare, financial services, legal, government, defence — data sovereignty is non-negotiable. SWAN enables complete on-premise AI deployment:

• No data leaves the premises. The model runs locally. Queries and responses stay within your network perimeter.
• No third-party API dependencies. No terms of service that grant providers rights to your data. No risk of API deprecation or pricing changes.
• Full audit trail control. You control logging, retention, and access to every interaction.
• Air-gapped capability. The model operates with zero internet connectivity after initial setup.

4. Quality That Matches Cloud-Scale Deployment

SWAN doesn't sacrifice quality for convenience. The quantized model delivers benchmark results that rival full-precision deployment:

The key: SWAN intelligently allocates precision where it matters. Rather than uniformly compressing every tensor to 4-bit, it identifies the 4.3% of tensors that are genuinely sensitive to quantization — attention projections, expert gates, critical pathway layers — and gives them 8-bit precision. The other 95.2% compress safely to 4-bit. The result: better perplexity than uniform quantization (4.283 vs 4.298) with near-zero quality degradation.

Enterprise Use Cases

On-Premise AI Assistant

Deploy a 400B parameter model as an internal AI assistant for knowledge workers. Legal teams, analysts, engineers, and executives get access to frontier-class AI reasoning without any data leaving your network. SWAN's 96% science reasoning accuracy and 77% expert knowledge score mean the model handles complex domain questions competently.

Secure Document Analysis

Process sensitive documents — contracts, medical records, financial reports, classified materials — through a locally-deployed model. No cloud API means no data exposure risk, no compliance grey areas, and no dependency on external service availability.

Code Generation and Review

With 78.7% HumanEval pass rate, SWAN-quantized models provide production-quality code generation and review capabilities. Deploy it on-premise to assist development teams without sending proprietary source code to external APIs.

Edge and Branch Office AI

A Mac Studio fits under a desk. SWAN-quantized models fit in 199 GB. Together, they enable powerful AI capabilities at branch offices, field locations, or any site with limited connectivity. No data centre required.

How the Technology Works (Non-Technical Summary)

Large AI models store their knowledge as billions of numbers (called "weights"). These numbers use 16 bits each by default. Quantization reduces them to 4 bits — shrinking the model by 4×. But not all weights are equally important.

SWAN examines each group of weights and asks four questions:

1. How concentrated is the information? If a few numbers carry most of the meaning, they need more protection.
2. Are there extreme outliers? Weights with extreme values are harder to compress without losing information.
3. How much does noise get amplified? Some weight groups amplify small errors into large output changes.
4. How much does compression actually change the values? The most direct test — simulate compression and measure the difference.

Based on these four measurements, SWAN assigns each group a precision level: 16-bit for the most critical (0.5% of the model), 8-bit for moderately sensitive weights (4.3%), and 4-bit for the majority (95.2%). The result is a model that's nearly as small as uniform 4-bit quantization but preserves quality where it matters most.

Getting Started

SWAN is open source and ready for production use. The pipeline requires:

• Hardware: Any Apple Silicon Mac with sufficient memory. A Mac Studio with M3/M4 Ultra (512 GB) handles models up to 400B+ parameters.
• Software: Python 3.9, MLX, PyTorch — standard, well-supported tools.
• Time: Under 13 minutes for analysis. Model conversion runs separately via MLX.
• Expertise: No ML engineering specialisation required. The pipeline is fully automated.

Code and documentation at github.com/baa-ai/swan-quantization.