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bigscience-workshop
petals
Python2022–2026
bigscience-workshop / petals

petals

🌸 Run LLMs at home, BitTorrent-style. Fine-tuning and inference up to 10x faster than offloading

40Distinct people
53Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
10.7KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

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What it is

🌸 Run LLMs at home, BitTorrent-style. Fine-tuning and inference up to 10x faster than offloading

GitHub

Where it is used

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What people are saying

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Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 12:54:37 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year53 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2022-12-13 15:32:45 UTC to 2026-10-20 04:30:09 UTC.

0102030402022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 1 submissions, 3 comments20222023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 39 mentions; 2 submissions, 37 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 0 submissions, 4 comments20242025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 6 mentions; 0 submissions, 6 comments. Incomplete calendar period.2026*

* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

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PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC413
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC39237
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC404
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
2026 (partial)2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC606

From the project README

An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.

Read the project’s introduction
Run large language models at home, BitTorrent-style. Fine-tuning and inference up to 10x faster than offloading Generate text with distributed Llama 3.1 (up to 405B), Mixtral (8x22B), Falcon (40B+) or BLOOM (176B) and fine‑tune them for your own tasks — right from your desktop computer or Google Colab: from transformers import AutoTokenizer from petals import AutoDistributedModelForCausalLM # Choose any model available at https://health.petals.dev model_name = "meta-llama/Meta-Llama-3.1-405B-Instruct" # Connect to a distributed network hosting model layers tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(model_name) model = AutoDistributedModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(model_name) # Run the model as if it were on your computer inputs = tokenizer("A cat sat", return_tensors="pt")["input_ids"] outputs = model.generate(inputs, max_new_tokens=5) print(tokenizer.decode(outputs[0])) # A cat sat on a mat... 🚀  Try now in Colab 🦙 Want to run Llama? Request access to its weights, then run huggingface-cli login in the terminal before loading the model. Or just try it in our chatbot app. 🔏 Privacy. Your data will be processed with the help of other people in the public swarm. Learn more about privacy here. For sensitive data, you can set up a private swarm among people you trust. 💬 Any questions? Ping us in our Discord! Connect your GPU and increase Petals capacity Petals is a community-run system — we rely on people sharing their GPUs. You can help serving one of the available models or host a new model from 🤗 Model Hub! As an example, here is how to host a part of Llama 3.1 (405B) Instruct on your GPU: 🦙 Want to host Llama? Request access to its weights, then run huggingface-cli login in the terminal before loading the model. 🐧 Linux + Anaconda. Run these commands for NVIDIA GPUs (or follow this for AMD): conda install pytorch pytorch-cuda=11.7 -c pytorch -c nvidia pip install git+https://github.com/bigscience-workshop/petals python -m petals.cli.run_server meta-llama/Meta-Llama-3.1-405B-Instruct 🪟 Windows + WSL. Follow this guide on our Wiki. 🐋 Docker. Run our Docker image for NVIDIA GPUs (or follow this for AMD): sudo docker run -p 31330:31330 --ipc host --gpus all --volume petals-cache:/cache --rm \ learningathome/petals:main \ python -m petals.cli.run_server --port 31330 meta-llama/Meta-Llama-3.1-405B-Instruct 🍏 macOS + Apple M1/M2 GPU. Install Homebrew, then run these commands: brew install python python3 -m pip install git+https://github.com/bigscience-workshop/petals python3 -m petals.cli.run_server meta-llama/Meta-Llama-3.1-405B-Instruct 📚  Learn more (how to use multiple GPUs, start the server on boot, etc.) 🔒 Security. Hosting a server does not allow others to run custom code on your computer. Learn more here. 💬 Any questions? Ping us in our Discord! 🏆 Thank you! Once you load and host 10+ blocks, we can show your name or link on the swarm monitor as a way to say thanks. You can specify them with --public_name YOUR_NAME. How does it work? You load a small part of the model, then join a network of people serving the other parts. Single‑batch inference runs at up to 6 tokens/sec for Llama 2 (70B) and up to 4 tokens/sec for Falcon (180B) — enough for chatbots and interactive apps. You can employ any fine-tuning and sampling methods, execute custom paths through the model, or see its hidden states. You get the comforts of an API with the flexibility of PyTorch and 🤗 Transformers. 📜  Read paper            📚  See FAQ 📚 Tutorials, examples, and more Basic tutorials: Getting started: tutorial Prompt-tune Llama-65B for text semantic classification: tutorial Prompt-tune BLOOM to create a personified chatbot: tutorial Useful tools: Chatbot web app (connects to Petals via an HTTP/WebSocket endpoint): source code Monitor for the public swarm: source code Advanced guides: Launch a private swarm: guide Run a custom model: guide Benchmarks Please see Section 3.3 of our paper. 🛠️ Contributing Please see our FAQ on contributing. 📜 Citations Alexander Borzunov, Dmitry Baranchuk, Tim Dettmers, Max Ryabinin, Younes Belkada, Artem Chumachenko, Pavel Samygin, and Colin Raffel. Petals: Collaborative Inference and Fine-tuning of Large Models. Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 3: System Demonstrations). 2023. @inproceedings{borzunov2023petals, title = {Petals: Collaborative Inference and Fine-tuning of Large Models}, author = {Borzunov, Alexander and Baranchuk, Dmitry and Dettmers, Tim and Riabinin, Maksim and Belkada, Younes and Chumachenko, Artem and Samygin, Pavel and Raffel, Colin}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 3: System Demonstrations)}, pages = {558--568}, year = {2023}, url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.01188} } Alexander Borzunov, Max Ryabinin, Artem Chumachenko, Dmitry Baranchuk, Tim Dettmers, Younes Belkada, Pavel Samygin, and Colin Raffel. Distributed inference and fine-tuning of large language models over the Internet. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36 (2023). @inproceedings{borzunov2023distributed, title = {Distributed inference and fine-tuning of large language models over the {I}nternet}, author = {Borzunov, Alexander and Ryabinin, Max and Chumachenko, Artem and Baranchuk, Dmitry and Dettmers, Tim and Belkada, Younes and Samygin, Pavel and Raffel, Colin}, booktitle = {Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems}, volume = {36}, pages = {12312--12331}, year = {2023}, url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.08361} } This project is a part of the BigScience research workshop.
Read the full README on GitHub

What Hacker News says

53 sources
Hm, looks like this is an old project (2022) associated with HuggingFace (https://huggingface.co/bigscience). Doesn't look like it's very active nowadays: https://github.com/bigscience-workshop/petals Article with more details: https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/20/petals-is-creating-a-free-... > [...] volunteers can donate their hardware power to tackle a portion of a text-generating workload and team up others to complete larger tasks, similar to Folding@home and other distributed compute setups.
In Petals: Run LLMs at home, BitTorrent-style
Linux gets a lot of funding and corporate development done actually. And training models is also getting cheaper every year. There are also projects like Petals which allow you to train models in a distributed fashion https://github.com/bigscience-workshop/petals And yeah, I do think China's government is going to continue subsidizing this tech because this tech is being used all over the place in China now. Meanwhile, the models aren't developed by the government, they're developed by individual countries that get subsidies. As I've explained above, converging on common infrastructure is going to save resources for all these companies. And continuing to work in the open with the rest of the world means getting the benefit of having a global community of researchers helping advance this tech forward. It's not just altruism or clout. Ameri
Read the rest
can companies working on closed models have to foot the bill for all the research, and they're limited to the brainpower within the company. And they're competing with Chinese which have much bigger research community contributing to developing their models. If the model itself is not the product, then American companies find themselves in a situation where they're spending a ton of resources on something that's not their core business.
In Statement on US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5
Things like petals (https://github.com/bigscience-workshop/petals) exist, distributed computing over willing participants. Right now corporate cash is being rammed into the space so why not snap it up while you can, but the moment it dries up projects like petals will see more of the love they deserve. I envision a future where crypto-style booms happen over tokens useful for purchasing priority computational time, which is earned by providing said computational time. This way researchers can daisy-chain their independent smaller rigs together into something with gargantuan capabilities.
In Chameleon: Meta’s New Multi-Modal LLM

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