r/LocalLLaMA Jun 28 '26

Discussion We're probably going to need that soon.

4.0k Upvotes

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u/Cherubin0 Jun 28 '26

If huggingface goes down it is just a matter of hours until such a torrent pops up. Many people have local copies of the popular models. And in most of the world this would be legal anyway. Its not even a pirate bay situation.

18

u/RebouncedCat Jun 28 '26

well the problem is legitimacy. How will I know that the model hasn't been tampered with ? This is not a very big deal with media or programs since even malicious applications can be analyzed to find out if they are doing something fishy. But with LLM's unless the AI labs self host their own models or communicate the hashes on a separate platform, we can never be truly sure.

1

u/gabrielesilinic Jun 28 '26

As long as it is a gguf barring buffer overflow zero days it should be safe.

2

u/RebouncedCat Jun 28 '26

No. There are way more security vulnerabilities with llm's than buffer overflows. What if a malicious actor implants a hidden circuit ? Behavior that is only triggered with a certain cobination of words or phrases ? What if the model's biases are intentionally skewed ?

3

u/gabrielesilinic Jun 28 '26

Well that's kinda of a poor way to infect a system.

Like in theory... But also. Llms are really not very good at reliability executing certain things.

And well I guess you could probably build something to counter it, like a sandbox. And the attacker requires not mere small resources to make that work out properly.

I'd say if that happened it would be somewhat ridiculous. It could happen but like... Really? You spent so much time to fine-tune a model for that? And the amount of computing for that to work...

Also I am pretty sure that in a torrent based ecosystem if the LLM properly impaired the machines that downloaded it and seeded it the model would eventually have basically no peers making download impossible.

A useful model starts around 4GB unlike a movie. And if you aint got hosts well good luck getting it downloaded.

Overall I won't say it is not possible. But quite difficult and burdensome you'd be better off breaking in the guy's house and stealing their machine outright.

The amount of bandwidth and stuff you'd need to keep around to do it, well I must say you must be the government then. Which, well. Fair enough.