AFAIK supposedly GGUF is a more extensible format that contains (or can contain) more metadata types that make it usable for different model architectures. The main advantage is that this should be the last breaking format change, as future changes can be added in a more modular way.

[–] noneabove1182 1 points 1 year ago

The significance is we have a new file format standard, bad news is it breaks compatibility with the old format so you'll have to update to use newer quants and you can't use your old ones

The good news is this is the last time that'll happen (it's happened a few times so far) as this one is meant to be a lot more extensible and flexible, storing a ton of extra metadata for extra compatibility

The great news is that this paves the way for better model support as we've seen already with support for falcon being merged: https://github.com/ggerganov/llama.cpp/commit/cf658adc832badaaa2ca119fe86070e5a830f8f6