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Pirate Face Rescues LLM Models from Deletion
- kevinsimper 11d agoThat is pretty smart, torrent should have been used for more things, and this is a perfect usecase!
- phoyd 11d agoTorrents should really be the preferred method for distributing AI model weights. Why rely on a single point of failure like Hugging Face? BitTorrent was made for exactly this.
- TeMPOraL 11d agoYeah, I thought they were used for this already. Surprised this is news, but also relieved.
- Oxodao 11d agoIIRC 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 https://x.com/MistralAI/status/1833758285167722836
- CodesInChaos 11d agoIn my experience public torrents often die as they grow older. It doesn't help that BitTorrent V1 makes long term seeding annoying, and BitTorrent V2 is almost never used.
- monsieurbanana 11d agoI never understood this, is there anything that makes it difficult for the original uploader, the one that supposedly offers the file directly, to offer a torrent instead for the same amount of time? As far as perennity is concerned it seems strictly better.
- cube00 11d agoIf they're no longer using that model they may not be willing to continue using their storage for it.
- csomar 11d agoHow 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?
- _blk 11d ago[flagged]
- pell 11d ago> Is there a fully in-browser torrent option that has the same UX as a regular file download in Firefox? Opera did back in the day.
- Wowfunhappy 11d agoWell, for a torrent to stay healthy, users have to seed after download, so it can't possibly have the same UX as a standard browser file download unless you want to either kill the ecosystem or hide from the user what is consuming upload bandwidth. That said, for large files, I much prefer the UX of a well-designed torrent client like Transmission to my web browser. If nothing else, the downloads are reliably resumable.
- QuantumNomad_ 11d ago> I much prefer the UX of a well-designed torrent client like Transmission to my web browser. If nothing else, the downloads are reliably resumable. Brave browser had BitTorrent client built in for a while. I tried it a couple of times as I already use Brave for web browsing on my laptop. It was a very confusing BitTorrent client. I struggled to use it, and wasted time waiting for a download to complete only to not be able to find where the files were and then they disappeared. Using a decent BitTorrent client like you say is much preferable to the one that they had in Brave browser.
- zenoprax 11d agoYou only need one person/organization to commit to seeding. The majority of people do not want to seed at all without some sort of incentive. If this site represents a coordinated datahoarding effort then there will be at least a few people who will seed indefinitely.
- csomar 11d agoThe 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/court-of-appeal-dismisses-kim-dotcom-challenge-to-us-extradition https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/science-and-technology/651123/cou... It’s interesting he’s no longer getting any media attention any more.
- ranger_danger 11d agoI always wondered why v2 is never used... you can even search for files by their individual hash with it.
- mitxela 11d agoBecause 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.
- bilegeek 11d agoThe 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.
- deleted 11d ago[deleted]
- Retr0id 11d agoA torrent with a webseed is strictly more resilient than a direct download link alone.
- PunchyHamster 11d agoYeah but that's what provider like huggingface could just do, keep seeding the models so they are still accessible
- boredumb 11d agoages 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.
- pmdr 11d agoHF 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.
- nntlol 11d ago[dead]
- yieldcrv 11d agogreat 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
- skeledrew 11d agoArguably this should've been a thing since day 1 (and probably would've helped to prevent the buyout), but better late than never.
- RobotToaster 11d agoHugging face seemed like buyout bait from day one.
- Avicebron 11d agoWhich makes it more surprising that something like this didn't exist. I'm relieved it does though.
- hirako2000 11d agoThe GitHub for models and AI. I remember. When a business subsidizes for several years all its offerings, one can guess how it will end.
- casper14 11d agoHonestly, 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
- mococa 11d agoSteam & Blizzard (probably others) used to delivery games through torrent protocol in the past, before CDNs became cheaper. When StarCraft 2 was lauched, the installer (before Battle.net installer crapware) had a complete graphical visualization of seeders & leechers. Reference: https://warcraft.wiki.gg/wiki/Blizzard_Downloader https://warcraft.wiki.gg/wiki/Blizzard_Downloader
- alexpotato 11d agoI've worked at trading firms where the "reference data master" file is usually a big json or equivalent. To get the file out to 100s or 1000s of machine they would often use private bittorent to distribute the file out.
- mococa 11d agoSame 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).
- mitxela 11d agoAs a private network, they have the option of multicast.
- alexpotato 11d agoWhen I retire and/or get "F You" money, I'm going to publicly tell a story about multicast, bittorrent and "not invented here" syndrome.
- ehe78qhe 11d agoI'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)
- bayindirh 11d agoOh, 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.
- bananaflag 11d agoNow I want GPT-4.5
- reilly3000 11d agoI’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?
- grommz 11d agoIf I search for 'uncensored' there are no torrents available. Uncensored models should be top priority, especially now that Nvidia owns HuggingFace and will enshittify the platform in accordance with upcoming US laws.
- sneurlax 11d agoThere 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
- behole 11d agoThat 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.
- hgoel 11d agoTorrents 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.
- wren6991 11d agoSpeaking to the "uncensored model" angle: there's little reason to distribute abliterated weights anyway. Instead of orthogonalising the weights that write back to the residual stream, you can just orthogonalise the activations themselves. It's equivalent. Orthogonalising activations at runtime is computationally cheap. Just distribute the refusal vectors (few thousand floats per layer), then run against the stock weights. Antirez's DS4 already supports this: https://github.com/antirez/ds4/blob/8db1d1d155cb0400a86a86b9c62d0defb3a6148b/dir-steering/README.md https://github.com/antirez/ds4/blob/8db1d1d155cb0400a86a86b9... Abliterated weights are just a bad habit we've gotten into. It's also deeply suboptimal from a precision point of view to take a model that's already been QATed and distributed in pre-quantised form (DeepSeek V4, Kimi K2.5 or K3...), modify its weights, and re-quantise it. Similarly, abliterated models regain some of their refusal behaviour when they're re-quantised after abliteration -- avoidable by keeping the two separate.
- jamienk 11d agoCan you explain this a bit to a non-expert? I haven't wrapped my mind around this
- mitxela 11d agoInstead 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.
- wren6991 11d agoThis is the original description of abliteration and it's quite approachable and interesting to read: Refusal in Language Models Is Mediated by a Single Direction (https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.11717 https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.11717). Warning: changes to your world view caused by seeing "HarmBench" used to maximise expected harm instead of minimising it may be irreversible. There's an empirical observation that models often have a single direction in their activation space for "hmm no I shouldn't do this". It forms naturally during pre-training, and is then surfaced during post-training to make the model refuse to engage in certain behaviour. With a little bit of linear algebra you can zap that direction from the model's activations, and it stops refusing to do things. You can also do the opposite: magnify that direction, and the model refuses to do anything at all.
- Razengan 11d agoSo begins the Merovingian and the Exiles..
- wolfy1993 11d agoI'd support this if I didn't have to post to xitter to claim my username. Really odd approach.
- skepticalgenius 11d ago[flagged]
- mcrumm 11d ago[flagged]
- mitxela 11d agoYou can also use HN but your HN account will be either shadow banned or rate limited because then you are spamming.
- QuantumNomad_ 11d agoInstead of telling people to post spam in the thread, they should do the same way that is done for example by these: - https://meet.hn/ https://meet.hn/ - https://book.keybase.io/account#adding-proofs https://book.keybase.io/account#adding-proofs Those tell you to put a text in your HN profile “about” section.
- mitxela 11d agoI don't think the point is to link the HN account to the PF account. I think the point is to spam HN.
- deleted 11d ago[deleted]
- mohd_rafay 11d ago[flagged]
- jamienk 11d agoLet'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.
- deleted 11d ago[deleted]
- reedf1 11d ago[flagged]
- mannyv 11d agoI 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."
- ganessh 11d ago[flagged]
- mmaunder 11d agoEdit: Deleted. Been oversharing a bit re research I'm doing, and the payoff is replies from folks who haven't bothered to go and take a look themselves, which I then have to spend more cycles refuting, etc. So best to just go back to the first step and not overshare and recover the cycles I'd spend on the rest of it. Admittedly I'm tired and pissed off, but yeah. HN won't let me delete this so I guess it's just a deletion edit. Sorry.
- dist-epoch 11d ago[flagged]
- KerrAvon 11d ago>They will after a few incidents where unguardrailed local models are used to hack and stop the water supply. This is irrational AI fearmongering. Please read https://sharptext.net/2026/some-of-all-fears/ https://sharptext.net/2026/some-of-all-fears/ > Market places where drugs/guns are sold are not, they are all infiltrated and shut down after a while. might want to look up "gun show loophole"
- dist-epoch 11d ago> This is irrational AI fearmongering. I said AFTER. If it doesn't happen, the local models will not be made illegal. So if you are right, you have nothing to fear.
- mitxela 11d agoAfter 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.
- aftbit 11d ago>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.
- mortalsilk 11d ago[flagged]
- skeledrew 11d ago[flagged]
- AndriiK 11d ago[flagged]
- sandcat_ 11d agoWhat on earth is going on with all the spam in this thread? Is this how you claim a username?
- JonChesterfield 11d agoThat or X...
- JonChesterfield 10d agoTurns out that the HN flagging mechanism hides the message from their auth check, so the spam doesn't actually work anyway. Oh well.
- mitxela 11d agoYes. This thing literally makes you spam HN in order to sign up. And for that reason this submission should be flagged.
- itomato 11d agoYes, and then delete or edit the comment.
- deleted 11d ago[deleted]
- befas 11d ago[dead]
- golem14 11d agoI 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.
- deleted 11d ago[deleted]
- bicepjai 11d agoYou did not have to call it “pirate”. That kind of set the negative tone for the website, and all the comments are looking at it with that view from the start. But it’s a great emoji Lego. I am working on something similar, mainly to make the download faster. I notice when you download these weights it will faster initially but very soon the throughput goes down after sometime.
- toomuchtodo 11d agoMirror the magnet torrent links at AcademicTorrents if you’d like. They are just a collection of url strings after all. https://academictorrents.com/ https://academictorrents.com/
- mitxela 11d agoPiracy has a positive tone for me. It implies liberating information.
- __MatrixMan__ 11d agoAye! Pro-democracy Protesters of the Caribbean just doesn't have the same ring to it.
- amelius 11d agoThe "pirate" name ensures that no company will buy it out later ;)
- Scaled 11d agoThis 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.
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- thih9 11d ago> 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=trending https://huggingface.co/models?other=open-source-model&sort=t...
- shevy-java 11d agoI do not want AI to live forever though.
- kseniiaZ 11d ago[flagged]
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- JonChesterfield 11d agoThis 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. edit2: Looks like an implementation error. I can create a torrent from local files and upload it, but it won't have the huggingface backstop, and I can't specify it, so that doesn't actually achieve the claimed result. Before creating community torrents in that fashion would actually be of use, the submission page needs to allow pointing at the upstream. Also, having everyone DIY a set of files -> torrent information is insane, this should not be a SKILLS.md, it should be a bash script that makes the thing.
- zymhan 11d ago[dead]
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- sharktheone 11d agoI hope GPT-3.5 will be released at some point. Would make me really sad if that gets lost at some point
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- mitxela 11d agoWhy 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?
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- itomato 11d agoYou can delete this now.
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- Proobel 11d agoWhy not use existing platforms? In any case, a resource like this is a step toward open AI.
- ButlerianJihad 11d agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Talk_Like_a_Pirate_Day https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Talk_Like_a_Pira...
- protocolture 11d agowaow (based based based based based based based)
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- totetsu 10d agoIs this a reaction to the idea that when HuggingFace comes into Nvidia owership, lots of models are going to be removed from the platform?
- irraodess 10d ago[flagged]
- kittikitti 10d agoMaking it to the finish line to seed a model is satisfying.
- chadgpt7 10d agoI've been known to seed a model or two in my day. Still married to one!
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