A side point, but this "recent" encoding goes back to a 2017 paper from the Allen Institute. These days a seven year old paper is ancient.
They went further and showed you could could get away with binary, you don't even need trinary!
You are probably referring to XNOR net, and the novel piece there was also using binary activations (which bitnet is not).
So as far as I can tell, bitnet is basically BinaryConnect applied to LLMs.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1511.00363
A side point, but this "recent" encoding goes back to a 2017 paper from the Allen Institute. These days a seven year old paper is ancient.
They went further and showed you could could get away with binary, you don't even need trinary!