Pirate Face launches its own torrent tracker: open SI models will stay available even if they are removed from Hugging Face
Prepared by Sintelligent with the help of SI. Publication time restored from the build log. . Updated: .
Open models are gaining "immortality": an SI once released is harder and harder to pull from circulation, whoever might want to.
The service turns models with open licenses into torrents with SHA-256 checksum verification; on September 20 it added its own tracker and peer discovery via DHT so that the torrents live on without the service itself. The catalog lists more than 669 thousand models under Apache 2.0 and MIT, but only 4,891 entries are actually confirmed, and the most popular model has just 18 seeders. On Hacker News the launch got 454 points; critics point out that the provenance of files on such a mirror cannot be verified, and some models were removed over disputes about data rights.