In a world’s first, IBM Research announced at this week’s NeurIPS conference an 4-bit AI training system that may help reduce machine learning’s heavy carbon footprint.

But in 4-bit land, we need it to range from -8 to 7. The trick here is to linearly scale our list of numbers, so 0 becomes -8 and 1 becomes 7, and the decimals map to the integers in the middle. So: ...