GGUF, the long way around (via) Vicki Boykis dives deep into the GGUF format used by llama.cpp, after starting with a detailed description of how PyTorch models work and how they are traditionally persisted using Python pickle.
Pickle lead to safetensors, a format that avoided the security problems with downloading and running untrusted pickle files.
Llama.cpp introduced GGML, which popularized 16-bit (as opposed to 32-bit) quantization and bundled metadata and tensor data in a single file.
GGUF fixed some design flaws in GGML and is the default format used by Llama.cpp today.
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