Haven't seen a single maliscious ckpt file so far. Sure, there is a possibility, but huggingface scans pickled weights automatically so the likelihood of someone using that site to spread malware in this form is super low
serious question, how on Earth should someone like me, who has completely missed the last 12 months of AI development, catch up with the state of the art?
tl;dr .ckpt files can contain Python pickles containing runnable Python code, which means a Bad Guy could create a .ckpt model containing malicious python code. Basically.
Conway & Miles - Machine Learning for Hackers: Case Studies and Algorithms to Get You Started
Once you read and understood this, I'd do an online course...
Read more here: https://docs.python.org/3/library/pickle.html
Then "weights" is just referring to a model's weights, a specific instance of a python object that can be pickled.