drforbin.ai Submit a torrent

Why torrents?

Weights are heavy. The web wasn't built to carry them.

A single popular model release now ranges from a few gigabytes to several hundred. Centralized hosting means someone pays for every download, rate limits appear when demand spikes, and one takedown, outage, or business decision can make a model vanish for everyone at once.

BitTorrent solves exactly this class of problem:

  • Resilience. With magnets and DHT there is no single point of failure. As long as one seeder exists anywhere, the model exists everywhere.
  • Cost. Bandwidth is shared by the swarm. A research lab can release a 100 GB model without a CDN bill.
  • Speed at peak. The more popular a release, the faster it downloads — the opposite of centralized hosting.
  • Archival permanence. Infohashes are content addresses. The same hash always names the same bytes, forever, and anyone can verify it.
  • Access. P2P routes around bandwidth-constrained and restricted networks better than any single host can.

What this site is — and is not

drforbin.ai is an index. We catalog magnet links and infohashes for AI models whose licenses permit redistribution of the weights, attach rich technical metadata, and link every listing back to its official Hugging Face model card. We do not host model files, and we reject listings for models whose licenses do not allow sharing.

The culture shift we want

The healthiest outcome is model creators publishing an official magnet alongside every Hugging Face release, the way Linux distributions have shipped ISOs by torrent for two decades. If you release open weights, add a magnet to your model card — and [list it here](/submit/) so people can find it.

Getting started

  1. Install a client — qBittorrent is free and open source.
  2. Find your model in the [index](/browse/) and copy the magnet.
  3. Paste it into your client. Downloads verify themselves piece by piece.
  4. Keep seeding after you finish. Your ratio is someone else's access.

Read the guides for more: [verifying downloads against Hugging Face checksums](/guides/verify-downloads/) and [seeding etiquette for large models](/guides/seeding/).