Is 3-Bit KV Cache the Holy Grail? A Reality Check on Google’s TurboQuant (opens in new tab)

Last Updated on May 11, 2026 by Editorial Team Author(s): Ravi Yogesh Originally published on Towards AI. 10 experiments, 3 models, one honest verdict: the quality story is real, the speed story needs a disclaimer, and there’s a finding in the entropy data nobody talks about. ⏱ ~14 min read🔬 Deep Dive⚙️ LLM Inference🗜 Quantization🚀 Serving Photo by Logan Voss on Unsplash When Google published TurboQuant at ICLR 2026, the headline was hard to ignore: compress your LLM’s key-value cache to 3 bi...