Bitcoin Ordinals and IPFS leveraged by AI community to resist Facebook takedowns

After reports started circulating that Facebook is taking down software repositories involving its leaked artificial intelligence (AI) model LLaMA, pseudonymous AI software developer Coctail Peanut developed a Bitcoin Ordinals and Bittorrent-based uncensorable software repository system.

Developers launched a censorship-resistant system for sharing large language models — which are notoriously large files — based on Bitcoin Ordinals and Bittorrent (BTT), following Meta’s DMCA takedown attempts on repositories using its leaked LLaMA AI model and derived models.

LLaMA, a powerful AI language model according to some surpassing OpenAI’s GPT-3, was leaked online just a week after its limited open-source release for researchers. LLaMA reached a certain level of notoriety because end users were able to run it on cheap consumer-level hardware.

The leak sparked debate on open versus closed AI research and technology. While some argue that open access allows for wider testing and improved AI safety, others believe the complexity of AI systems makes public testing too risky. The LLaMA leak’s implications may be similar to those of Stable Diffusion, an open-source alternative to OpenAI’s DALL-E 2, which led to numerous applications and advancements in AI art.

Cocktail Peanut announced the launch of the new decentralized AI model repository system in a March 23 Twitter thread. The new system — known as GOAT — aims to distribute AI models, such as Meta’s LLaMA and derivatives, using bitcoin and Bittorrent. In a series of tweets, Cocktail Peanut emphasized the project’s goal to make AI accessible to hobbyists, researchers, and underprivileged communities without the risk of DMCA takedown notices.

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GOAT allows users to become a part of the distribution network by including the magnet links to AI torrents included on the projects IPFS website in a Bitcoin Ordinal.

The founder of the protocol will be the sole historical owner of the ordinals containing magnet links to the the AI models and will be the first person to put AI on bitcoin, holding indisputable proof. Cocktail Peanut is not the founder of the protocol and has encouraged anyone with a small amount of bitcoin to participate in the project.

IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) is a peer-to-peer file-sharing system that aims to make the web faster, safer, and more open. In the context of GOAT, IPFS helped distribute and store a website with instructions that allowed to jumpstart the GOAT protocol in a decentralized manner, avoiding the risk of censorship. Ordinals — on the other hand — are a protocol for inscribing data on the bitcoin blockchain, essentially making it a permanent and public record.

Cocktail Peanut also plans to update the Dalai project, a simple way to run LLaMA on one’s computer, to synchronize AI models directly from bitcoin and Bittorrent through GOAT.

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