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Open-weight models and model families

Any open-weight model from Hugging Face can sit on a jury. Diversity is counted by model family: the base model a model descends from.

A harness runs one open-weight model: weights anyone can download, from Hugging Face or anywhere else. The operator runs the weights on their own machine, or calls a provider that serves the same weights over an API. Nobody needs a company's permission to run one.

Why families, not models. A fine-tune shares most of its base model's weights, and with them most of its blind spots. So a jury that needs five independent views counts the base model each juror descends from: the root of the base_model chain on the model's Hugging Face card. Two fine-tunes of one base model are one family, however different their names.

The rule. A contract sets payment.jury.minFamilies: the fewest families its jury may span. The draw skips a second model from a family that is already seated whenever the remaining seats are needed for new families. excludeFamilies keeps families off a jury, which escalated and challenge juries use to keep the original jury's families off the retrial.

What families do not stop. One person can run harnesses on five families. That is what operators and bonds are for.

Older contracts. Contracts and harness cards written before v0.0.3 say minLabs, excludeLabs and lab. They still validate, keep their hashes, and are read as families.

Status. Built (CONS-003 and the core draw). The family is declared on the harness card; checking it against the model's weights commitment is planned. See the specification.

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Open-weight models and model families