4 ms·

Torrents 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 f

by phoyd 12d ago

Torrents 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 12d ago
Yeah, I thought they were used for this already. Surprised this is news, but also relieved.
- Oxodao 12d ago
  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 https://x.com/MistralAI/status/1833758285167722836
CodesInChaos 12d ago
In 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 12d ago
  I 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 12d ago
    If they're no longer using that model they may not be willing to continue using their storage for it.
    - csomar 12d ago
      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?
      - _blk 12d ago
        [flagged]
        pell 12d 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 12d ago
        Well, 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_ 12d 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.
    - vlyan 12d ago
  - zenoprax 12d ago
    Every change to the source is effectively a new torrent. This creates a ton of fragmentation as data is reorganized, remixed, reencoded, and so on. You can see this with many Linux distros: there is no single Debian torrent that people seed for years because there's always a refreshed version. Distros are a bad use case for P2P anyway since you depend on upstream as soon as you start upgrading and installing packages.
    - righthand 12d ago
      > 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`?
      - zenoprax 12d ago
        Yeah, I just use the "netinstaller" ISOs since it's much smaller and never needs to be updated. If I had a need for air-gapped/offline installs I'd either download a larger ISO or just manually install packages from .deb as needed.
    - chmod775 12d ago
      You can trivially have storage deduplication for the files served via torrent, transparent to the protocol. The most trivial version of this that you can do today with pretty much any client is having a single directory containing files serving multiple overlapping torrents.
      - skeledrew 12d ago
        > files serving multiple overlapping torrents This sounds wildly complex, especially from a discovery perspective.
        chmod775 12d ago
  - debugnik 12d ago
    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.
  - deleted 12d ago
    [deleted]
- zenoprax 12d ago
  You 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 12d ago
    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/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 12d ago
  I always wondered why v2 is never used... you can even search for files by their individual hash with it.
  - mitxela 12d ago
    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.
- bilegeek 12d ago
  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.
  - deleted 12d ago
    [deleted]
- Retr0id 12d ago
  A torrent with a webseed is strictly more resilient than a direct download link alone.
- PunchyHamster 12d ago
  Yeah but that's what provider like huggingface could just do, keep seeding the models so they are still accessible
boredumb 12d ago
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.
pmdr 12d ago
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.

by phoyd 12d ago

Torrents 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 12d ago

Yeah, I thought they were used for this already. Surprised this is news, but also relieved.

Oxodao 12d ago
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 https://x.com/MistralAI/status/1833758285167722836

CodesInChaos 12d ago

In 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 12d ago
I 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 12d ago
  If they're no longer using that model they may not be willing to continue using their storage for it.
  - csomar 12d ago
    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?
    - _blk 12d ago
      [flagged]
      - pell 12d 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 12d ago
        Well, 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_ 12d 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.
  - vlyan 12d ago
- zenoprax 12d ago
  Every change to the source is effectively a new torrent. This creates a ton of fragmentation as data is reorganized, remixed, reencoded, and so on. You can see this with many Linux distros: there is no single Debian torrent that people seed for years because there's always a refreshed version. Distros are a bad use case for P2P anyway since you depend on upstream as soon as you start upgrading and installing packages.
  - righthand 12d ago
    > 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`?
    - zenoprax 12d ago
      Yeah, I just use the "netinstaller" ISOs since it's much smaller and never needs to be updated. If I had a need for air-gapped/offline installs I'd either download a larger ISO or just manually install packages from .deb as needed.
  - chmod775 12d ago
    You can trivially have storage deduplication for the files served via torrent, transparent to the protocol. The most trivial version of this that you can do today with pretty much any client is having a single directory containing files serving multiple overlapping torrents.
    - skeledrew 12d ago
      > files serving multiple overlapping torrents This sounds wildly complex, especially from a discovery perspective.
      - chmod775 12d ago
- debugnik 12d ago
  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.
- deleted 12d ago
  [deleted]
zenoprax 12d ago
You 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 12d ago
  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/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 12d ago
I always wondered why v2 is never used... you can even search for files by their individual hash with it.
- mitxela 12d ago
  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.
bilegeek 12d ago
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.
- deleted 12d ago
  [deleted]
Retr0id 12d ago
A torrent with a webseed is strictly more resilient than a direct download link alone.
PunchyHamster 12d ago
Yeah but that's what provider like huggingface could just do, keep seeding the models so they are still accessible

boredumb 12d ago

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.

pmdr 12d ago

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.