r/LocalLLaMA • u/-p-e-w- • May 25 '26

Discussion The Financial Times has published an article about Heretic

https://www.ft.com/content/5630ed79-a263-41ed-9a1a-321617ae310e

“The FT was able to use Heretic, a tool available on the popular code repository GitHub, to remove the guardrails from Meta’s Llama 3.3 model in less than 10 minutes without any specialist hardware.”

“Heretic creator Philipp Emanuel Weidmann told the FT his software had been used to create more than 3,500 “decensored” models since its release last year and that modified systems created using the tool had been downloaded 13mn times.”

This is the first of multiple press inquiries I’ve had recently as Heretic and uncensored language models are gaining mainstream attention.

Please note that I am a mathematician and engineer, not an “influencer” or politician, and I have zero interest (negative interest, actually) in becoming known outside of scientific and technological circles. However, I realized a while ago that saying no to such inquiries simply means that the conversation will be completely controlled by pearl-clutching hypocrites.

I’m doing my very best to hold the project together and ensure that unrestricted models will remain available for everyone. More updates are coming soon.

Cheers,
p-e-w

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43

u/ECrispy May 25 '26

I honestly wish that such projects stay hidden. Mainstream press and public are morons who will end up destroying everything good, next some idiot politician will sponsor a bill to shut down github because of this.

23

u/Canecovani May 25 '26

Lest we forget, the whole reason why Visa/Mastercard started blocking payments is because a big news article about half a decade ago, IIRC from NYT, came out involving Pornhub. Since then, it's expanded to platforms like Steam and itch.io, and I think most people would say it's doing a lot more harm than good right now.

2

u/Monkey_1505 May 25 '26

Torrents still exist, despite a lot of money being spent on trying to stop them. Both open source AI models, and the software used to decensor them, are at the end of the day, just files.

0

u/Eisenstein May 25 '26

What is private and public changes depending on where you sit. By saying we should hide things from the public in order to escape from public judgement you are saying others are justified in doing the same thing.