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by swyx 806 days ago
you must be new to mistral releases. they invented the magnet first blog later meta
1 comments

At 3:30a France local? Alrighty. I still wait a lil bit ;)
What could a malicious model do, though? Curse at you?
Not .safetensors though
Exploit a memory safety issue in the tokenizer/or other parts of your LLM infra written in a native language.
??? With weights?
There was a buffer overflow or some other exploit like that in llama.cpp and the gguf format. It has been fixed now, but it's definitely possible. Also weights distributed as python pickles can run arbitrary code.
Distributing anything as python pickles seems utterly batshit to me.
There are plenty of exploits where the payload is just "data" read by some vulnerable program (PDF readers, image viewers, browsers, compression tools, messaging apps, etc)
Yes, there's a reason weights are now distributed as "safetensors" files. Malicious weights files in the old formats are possible, and while I haven't seen evidence of the new format being exploitable, I wouldn't be surprised if someone figures out how to do it eventually.