There is an argument to be made about the importance of archeological preservation of the provenance of models, especially the first few important LLMs, for study by future generations.
In general, software rot is a huge issue, and many projects which may be of future archeological importance are increasingly non-reproducible as dependencies are often not vendored and checked into source, but instead downloaded at compile time from servers which lack strong guarantees about future availability.
This is comment is cooler than my Arctic Vault badge on GitHub.
Who were the countless unknown contemporaries of Giotto and Cimabue? Of Da Vinci and Michelangelo? Most of what we know about Renaissance art comes from 1 guy - Giorgio Vasari. We have more diverse information about ancient Egypt than the much more recent Italian Renaissance because of, essentially, better preservation techniques.
Compliance, interoperability, and publishing platforms for all this work (HuggingFace, Ollama, GitHub, HN) are our cathedrals and clay tablets. Who knows what works will fill the museums of tomorrow.
In general, software rot is a huge issue, and many projects which may be of future archeological importance are increasingly non-reproducible as dependencies are often not vendored and checked into source, but instead downloaded at compile time from servers which lack strong guarantees about future availability.