Back Up Your Models, and Thank Your Maintainers

I spend a fair bit of my working life depending on things I don’t control. A container registry, a package mirror, a GitHub Action somebody wrote in 2021 and then wandered off from. Every DevOps person learns early that the question isn’t whether a dependency will change under you. It’s when, and whether you kept a copy.

That’s the thought I had reading r/LocalLLaMA over the last day. The two biggest threads were about Nvidia and Jensen Huang. As far as I can tell from the discussion, he has left the company, there’s an employee petition to bring him back, and Nvidia’s purchase of Hugging Face is suddenly looking uncertain. The Hugging Face CEO posted that he’ll keep fighting for open source AI. The top comment was that the fact he has to say it is a bit ominous.

I don’t know what’s actually going on. Most of the thread is working from headlines, a video, and a lot of imagination. There’s a long tangent about spies that I’m going to leave alone. If you want a confident take on the corporate drama, you’ll have to get it elsewhere.

What interested me was the reaction underneath. Nobody was panicking about the boardroom. They were opening their disk usage and doing sums. One comment said it plainly: backing up the models and datasets you actually use is good practice anyway, however this plays out. That one got no jokes in reply, which on that forum is a form of respect.

There’s a quiet irony here. “Open” models are only open while someone keeps the lights on. Hugging Face is a company with servers and a burn rate, and its future was always going to depend on someone’s money. Someone in the thread pointed out that statements from an acquired company’s CEO are worth very little once the deal closes. That’s cynical, and also a fair summary of most acquisitions I’ve lived through. Another commenter noted that the cofounders sold, so the newfound crusading is a bit rich. I’m not sure that’s fair. People can sell a company and still mean what they say. I’m also not sure it’s unfair.

I hold both views. I’d like to believe the HF CEO. I’d also like a local copy of the weights.

The other big thread was happier, and I liked it more. llama.cpp has hit version 1.0. For anyone outside this world: it’s the project that made running a language model on an ordinary computer a normal thing to do. My own first run of a local model on a Mac, a few years ago, felt like watching a dial-up modem connect. A small, strange noise, then a miracle.

The replies were mostly thanks. One person said they’d never have learned what they know about running models hands-on without the project. That’s the sincere sentence I’ll allow myself today. Projects like this teach people, and that matters more than any release number.

Then the thread turned, as these threads do, and the second most common reply was “please add more maintainers.” Plenty of open pull requests are sitting unreviewed. People are drifting to other engines for speed. Some commenters said the project has been slow to merge things, and others countered that more contributors doesn’t automatically mean faster progress. I think both are true. I’ve seen a project die from too little review and another from too much enthusiasm.

Put the two threads side by side and they’re the same story. The foundation of local AI is a handful of people with limited hours and a corporate steward that may or may not stay friendly. The community’s response to the risk is to ask for more maintainers and hoard hard drives. Both are sensible. Neither is a plan.

I’m a public-institutions sort of person, so I’ll say the unfashionable thing. Infrastructure everyone relies on probably shouldn’t hang on one company’s goodwill or a few volunteers’ weekends. Australia learned this slowly with roads, power and broadband, and not always happily. I don’t know what the equivalent is for model weights and inference engines. A foundation with real funding, maybe. A public archive. I haven’t thought it through enough to defend it.

I’ll also admit the environmental side nags at me. Half the posts in that forum are about buying more GPUs, and one was a man delighted that his son had a shed full of old mining cards. I grinned at that, and then I thought about the power bill.

For now, the practical part is boring. I’m going to check what I’ve got stored, copy the models I actually use onto a spare drive, and note which ones I’d miss. It’s a few hours of work. I’ll probably do it on the weekend, between a bit of Elden Ring and pretending I’ll tidy the garage.

If the open ecosystem is fine, I’ve lost an afternoon. If it isn’t, I’ll be very glad I did it.