That is pretty smart, torrent should have been used for more things, and this is a perfect usecase!

IIRC Mistral used to do it, not sure if that's still the case

EDIT/ Yes they did, that no longer seems to be the case though

https://x.com/MistralAI/status/1833758285167722836

How does this address the previous point? If they are not providing storage, then centralized or decentralized doesn’t make a difference.

Torrent/P2P can only add redundancy, so it’s impossible to have worse availability than a download link?

They don't. That's the conversation topic.

Nor do they need to. 99% of everything is crap, and not worth prescribing except for a random sample so future historians can study our crap.

Distros are a bad use case for P2P anyway since you depend on upstream as soon as you start upgrading and installing packages.

This is true for any distribution method not just p2p. You can even download a nightly through torrents so what does it matter how the data is transferred if it’s always going to require `apt update`?

I don't see why it would be. It's transparent to other clients just like it is to the protocol. It cannot be more complex than alternatives by construction.

but model releases are already non-changeable?

The problems begin with taking 5-10 minutes to locate a file on the network.

You can add an existing HTTP download as a "web seed" to a torrent, so they don't actually need to do anything for people to share it as a torrent.

The last guy (kimdotcom) who was working on this (incentive for seeding) seems to be heading to the US: https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/science-and-technology/651123/cou...

It’s interesting he’s no longer getting any media attention any more.

Because history is path-dependent, as engineers keep learning over and over again. It doesn't matter whether Plan9 is theoretically superior to Linux - we're all on Linux and nobody's porting all the apps over.

The biggest problem with BTv1 was the lack of per-file checksumming, and swarm merging (i.e. individual files have shared seeding pools across torrents). BTv2 specs the latter, but I think only BiglyBT actually implements it. Having both of those features from the get-go would've gone a LONG way to fixing the dead torrent problem.

A torrent with a webseed is strictly more resilient than a direct download link alone.

ages ago I tried using IPFS to more or less accomplish this, I imagined it to act more like a weights/training data network fs that everyone would be able to participate in.

HF is meant to be a single point of control. AI models and Linux distros aren't usually for normies, so distribution via torrents would make sense, especially to save the provider some bandwidth. Ubuntu has been offering torrent downloads for ages. No mention of torrents on HF. I believe most downloads will soon be account/EULA-walled.

great initiative, it's really weird seeing efficiencies get rediscovered in the LLM audience, because these efficiencies aren't even what I would consider to be old

but I guess they are

Which makes it more surprising that something like this didn't exist. I'm relieved it does though.

The GitHub for models and AI. I remember.

When a business subsidizes for several years all its offerings, one can guess how it will end.

Honestly, models are torrents will end any effort from the big AI labs to stop open models. No way to prevent weights from being shared, just like mobies. Genie is out of the bottle

Same here. Inspired by both, I used to delivery videos over torrent to in door machines since at that time, there's no CDNs (or it was difficult to get one).

As a private network, they have the option of multicast.

I've seen this used for distributing container images in networks with awkward network topologies (e.g. a lot of bandwidth within a site or sub-site but limited bandwidth to central registries)

Oh, story time:

Once I was using Blizzard's downloader to install something (StarCraft, Diablo, I don't remember), and it was kinda slow. I disabled P2P downloads and speed skyrocketed, and I said "Huh, this was unexpected".

When P2P downloads disabled you could see the list of CDNs you're downloading from and mine had a single IP on that list. It looked familiar. Then it dawned on to me. It was the Akamai server which we were hosting in our system room, at 15 minutes of driving distance. After a chuckle, I went to get a cup of tea, because that was entertaining than the game itself.

Then of course, I dived into whatever I was installing that night.

Edit: From the screenshots in the wiki, I remembered that the progress bar was red. It was possibly Diablo 3, then. However, I'm still not 100% sure about it.

This is less efficient (in bandwidth, complexity, and monetary cost) than an HTTPS based CDN.

There’s web seeding

I don't know how to respond to that, because it has quite a few negative effects on them..

Steam has a limited form of p2p delivery, used on LANs: https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/46BD-6BA8-B012-CE...

Now I want GPT-4.5

I’ve been wondering when this will come. The days are numbered for abliterated models to be published on HF I think. Why wouldn’t the government want a central control there?

There are such results on huggingface tho. Also search for the keywords “abliteration” and “heretic”. Heretic is a tool used to abliterate, that is decensor, models

That was my my first search too. I know they are still listed on HF but every time I try and use one, the links are dead or the size is beyond my scope. Was hoping for a fresh batch. Ill check back.

Torrents always seemed like the more sensible way to distribute model weights.

Though I have been disappointed that most of these have been spurred on by the misleading claim that abliterated models were being taken down from HuggingFace because they removed an abliterated model. HF took one abliterated model down because the uploader was spamming people who requested access with sketchy requirements to pay for it.

Plus, there are a bunch of these types of sites, all of them have a couple of models and otherwise completely dead.

There's also the problem of catching malicious models that have been fine tuned to exfiltrate credentials. It would be nice to have means of checking hashes against the HF versions (or against other reputable sources). I'm guessing this is probably easy when just serving the same folder as what HF serves.

Edit: I should've scrolled down on the page, it does verify against the HF hashes.

Instead of editing the weights so they don't create the refusal signal, just let them do whatever, then delete the refusal signal itself. You don't want to edit quantised weights because it causes a loss of precision that can be pretty bad.

I'm not active in this space but why do you think anything happened since this? As far as I know, it still works.

I've seen attempts to obfuscate the refusal direction, like here: https://arxiv.org/html/2608.18093v1

Also this one was interesting, training the model to give preambles with reasons for the reasons for refusal seems to make it less sensitive to modulating the single refusal direction: https://arxiv.org/html/2505.19056v1

My empirical observation is that when a new model is released on HuggingFace, an abliterated version with < 10/100 refusals (baseline usually 100/100) is uploaded the same day, so either these techniques don't work very well or the open-weight labs aren't applying them.

There's some defense-in-depth, like a lot of the "guardrails" people hit on cloud models are classifiers applied to prompt or output, not a refusal generated by the model. Also closed-weight models obviously try to avoid this by not letting you see or modify the weights.

Yeah, orthogonalisation is a special case of a rank-1 LoRA.

I am, in fact, I’m offering something much better, a compact format that exactly restores an abliterated model from a tiny JSON file:

https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/s/iksvmXBzuC

Here's a widely used toolkit: https://github.com/p-e-w/heretic

Distributing the vectors themselves isn't (yet) common practice, because people have gotten used to just putting the full modified weights up on HuggingFace's huge free storage.

I believe abliterated models are mostly still created at this point because they're "universal": they can not only be run locally, and on cloud GPUs, but also on "managed inference" providers (i.e. services where you hand them a model URI, and they blindly fetch it, load it, and give you inference access to it through standard text/chat-completion APIs. Think HuggingFace Spaces, or Google CoLab, or CloudFlare Workers AI.)

Such managed inference providers have (for now) plausible deniability of behaving ethically (at least enough that they don't get boycotted / scare away investors) due to them being "blind" to what gets run on their systems. They're acting as the inference equivalent of data transit carriers.

But I don't think it would be possible for managed inference providers to publicly expose "runtime activation steering" in the way antirez's DS4 does, without that reading much more explicitly as them inviting unethical workloads.

(Yes, there are other things you can do with runtime steering. But almost all of those things are workload-specific, relying on you privately tuning to the needs of your own dataset. And if you can do that, you can run inference without the help of a managed inference provider. The only time a customer will come along with a pre-made runtime-steering vector file in hand, is if that vector is an alignment-orthogonalization vector.)

Similarly, abliterated models regain some of their refusal behaviour when they're re-quantised after abliteration

Thanks for this information, Q4 seemed fine but they reappeared again in Q5 with an vengeance, I couldn't understand why. Very Strict and I've only found one jail break that barely works around 60% of the time.

Yeah I use a custom fork of llama.cpp that has an abliteration feature that basically does this. It's sloppily vibe coded and I don't have time to coordinate on a way to do this cleanly upstream, but it's absolutely possible and saves a lot of time and bandwidth from being wasted

That paper you linked has all of the information you need. The linear algebra they do on the weights there to null out one direction reduces to a single (dot-product + broadcast-multiply + add) on the activations.

So begins the Merovingian and the Exiles..

You can also use HN but your HN account will be either shadow banned or rate limited because then you are spamming.

Let's imagine that a model is pulled from HF by order of the new overlords or because of some other kind of censorship. Wouldn't the question of it having a Free license or not potentially become a complex legal issue?

But if the point is to be "censorship-free" then why respect licenses at all? They are among main choke points today. If authoritarians use licenses to censor political, artistic, scientific, etc., speech that they want to block, does that make the censorship more respectable?

When Anthropic sues a Chinese lab for IP infringement and get a court to put a bar on that software, does it THEN get pulled from Pirate Face?

I know that an awful lot of international negotiations have become focused more and more on questions of "IP" - licensing battles are already intensely politicized and it's hard to imagine a future where it doesn't get much much worse. Imagine N Korea coming after you for violating a license that they worked hard to control and leverage.

I can see all these old models hanging out and bitching about the newfangled models that think they're so great.

"Trillions of parameters? Trillion my ass. Back in my day we got by with millions. And now here we are, washed up has beens."

After nginx blows up a city, it'll be illegal to run or have a copy of nginx.

"But nginx won't blow up a city..."

Relax. If it doesn't happen, your nginx is safe.

might want to look up "gun show loophole"

I've never understood this. There is no "gun show loophole" anymore, if there ever was. Some states have two different standards required things like background checks and identification for gun sales between private party sales and dealer sales. If a dealer goes to a gun show, they have to background check their buyers just like anywhere else. Similarly, if a private party (in a state where they're not required to background check) sells a gun on Craigslist, they're equally unrequired to background check.

Many states, including most of the "anti-gun" states, have moved to requiring background checks from all sellers, including person-to-person transfers and even gifts from family.

The "gun show loophole" is massively overblown. There's nothing special about gun shows in it.

DS 4.1 Flash absolutely has guardrails. Maybe not ones as effective as some models.

open wait

That or X...

Yes. This thing literally makes you spam HN in order to sign up. And for that reason this submission should be flagged.

I wish they had used a better name. Why try to make it sound sinister and adjacent to piratebay etc? It's not that these models are illegal to own or download.

Mirror the magnet torrent links at AcademicTorrents if you’d like. They are just a collection of url strings after all.

https://academictorrents.com/

Piracy has a positive tone for me. It implies liberating information.

This site could be useful also since there's been a recent trend of abliterated model providers demanding a hugging face account and email collection. I assume this is so the providers can spam people since there's not much other benefit. Hugging face had also been making it harder to sign up with disposable email addresses since they throw a weird error during sign up if they detect it. Anyway, I see a site like this being useful to sidestep all that data collection.

The goal is permanence for open-source AI

My instinct is to correct this to “open weight”, because when I filter huggingface by open source[1], I get only one result.

Then again, this could be about long term goals so perhaps I’m wrong; I wouldn’t mind that.

[1]: https://huggingface.co/models?other=open-source-model&sort=t...

I do not want AI to live forever though.

This is really important. I am already tired of hoarding rclone copies of huggingface torrents and periodically checking them for bitrot. Pirateface is not a very helpful name for it though and it doesn't seem to have scripted torrent creation either.

Is hosting the same thing at 'academictorrents' actually a viable thing? In terms of peers from either send data to one another?

edit: looks like it can treat huggingface as a backstop for torrents that are otherwise not shared which is interesting, whole load of checksum nonsense I hand rolled disappear if bittorrent handles that. Except it doesn't work?

    Magnet soon No seeders yet - a torrent mints once a seeder packages this model.

So there's some per-torrent work to be done, but I don't know what that is, and I don't see how it can be based on files I have locally _and also_ be an exact match to files on huggingface. So I'm missing something here.

I hope GPT-3.5 will be released at some point. Would make me really sad if that gets lost at some point

Why is the sign-up system so complicated? Why not just log into your HF account and be done? You're trying to force people to spam on X and HN so that their X and HN accounts get deleted?