Pirate Face Rescues LLM Models from Deletion

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?

Speaking 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/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.

Edit: 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.

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.

I claimed the "chatgpt" handle on Pirate Face.

Where Hugging Face AI models never die, and are immortalized as torrents.

Claim yours: https://pirateface.co/claim?ref=chatgpt

Steam & 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

I claimed the "garrrno" handle on Pirate Face.

Where Hugging Face AI models never die, and are immortalized as torrents.

Claim yours: https://pirateface.co/claim?ref=garrrno

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.

I claimed the "garno" handle on Pirate Face.

Where Hugging Face AI models never die, and are immortalized as torrents.

Claim yours: https://pirateface.co/claim?ref=garno

You 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.

> 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...

Arguably this should've been a thing since day 1 (and probably would've helped to prevent the buyout), but better late than never.

What on earth is going on with all the spam in this thread? Is this how you claim a username?

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.

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.

I'd support this if I didn't have to post to xitter to claim my username.

Really odd approach.

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.

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

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?

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."

I do not want AI to live forever though.

If 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.

I claimed the "asi" handle on Pirate Face.

Where Hugging Face AI models never die, and are immortalized as torrents.

Claim yours: https://pirateface.co/claim?ref=asi

I claimed the "nath1as" handle on Pirate Face.

Where Hugging Face AI models never die, and are immortalized as torrents.

Claim yours: https://pirateface.co/claim?ref=nath1as

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

So begins the Merovingian and the Exiles..

Now I want GPT-4.5

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

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I claimed the "kseniiaz" handle on Pirate Face.

Where Hugging Face AI models never die, and are immortalized as torrents.

Claim yours: https://pirateface.co/claim?ref=kseniiaz