Can someone explain why the weights are posted via a Bittorrent magnet link? I have no way to check the size at the moment, but isn't that a bit unusual? There's also only 21 seeders right now according to https://checker.openwebtorrent.com/
it's been criminalized to hell by IP holders and hollywood. Such a shame they killed the best tech of the previous decade. Could have revolutionized how we distribute content, approach CDN and even streaming.
Neither of those are against the bittorrent protocol itself. Lots of software like Ubuntu is legally available on bittorrent, and I've never seen anything done to restrict that.
It may become a tradition since weights are so large. Perhaps it started when the Llama torrent link leaked. Then, Mistral decided to release their weights using bittorrent.
I would have assumed they could just upload it to Github. If it has restrictions on file size I'm sure they could make multiple part compressed files.
Torrents can unfortunately die after a period of time if no one continues seeding it or if they don't use a permanent web based seeder, which doesn't appear to be the case.
Soft size limit means "If your repository excessively impacts our infrastructure, you might receive an email from GitHub Support asking you to take corrective action." - I know people who have received such emails.
Most model releases happen through Hugging Face which does not have such a size limit.
The great thing about torrents is that you (or anyone else who cares) can single-handedly solve the problem you're complaining about by seeding the torrent.
No git would be impossible. I’ve never seen a repo even a few GB in size, if you are uploading non code files you really should not be using git. Git is a version management software for code. I often see repos which images and even videos checked in, please don’t, there are so many far better and more performant solutions out there.
The other approach would be to use AWS S3 or other cloud providers which would cost them money every time someone downloads their code, which is not their prerogative to pay for when they are releasing something for free. Torrents seems like the only good solution, unless someone hosts this on the cloud for free for everyone.
Interesting, had no idea git had a VFS or that MS was a Monorepo. I guess git is much more capable than I thought but the average user really should just be uploading code into github
> No git would be impossible. I’ve never seen a repo even a few GB in size, if you are uploading non code files you really should not be using git
It's not actually a limitation in git itself, especially if you use Git LFS. People use Git for Unreal projects and big ones can be half a terabyte or more in size.
Others have pointed out that GitHub doesn't allow that, but
> Torrents can unfortunately die after a period of time if no one continues seeding it or if they don't use a permanent web based seeder, which doesn't appear to be the case.
So to can web links, especially when they are 300 GB and egressing out of AWS at $0.09/GB or worse (in non-US regions). Each full download would cost $27 at that rate. 10,000 downloads would cost $270,000.
Sure you could go for something with a better cost model like R2, but you can't beat using one or two unmetered connections on a VPN to constantly seed on Bittorrent, your pricing would be effectively free and reliability would be higher than if you just exposed a HTTP server on the Internet in such a way.
There's a lot of seeders on the torrent that are actually AWS ips too, all with similar configurations which makes me believe that it's probably xAI running them
It wasn't much of a leak. Facebook was pretending to keep it private for PR reasons but putting approximately zero effort into actually keeping it private.
I don't understand why you're being downvoted for asking a legitimate question. People not familiar with model weights might be surprised that they are often in tens of gigabytes and in this case even more.
