alt Hacker NewsI have a hard time believing their numbers. If you can pay off a mac mini in 2-4 months, and make $1-2k profit every month after that, why wouldn’t their business model just be buying mac minis?
Replies
The numbers are optimistically legit -- it's calculated based purely considering we have demand for all machines at all times. We don't have that right now, but fairly optimistic that people will do it.
That's why we don't recommend purchasing a new machine. Existing machine is no cost for you to run this.
Electricity is one cost, but it will get paid off from every request it receives. Electricity is only deducted when you run an inference. If you have any questions, DM me @gajesh on Twitter.
Solid q. I think the part of it is that it’s really easy to attract some “mass” (capital) of users, as there are definitely quite a few of idle Macs in the world.
Non-VC play (not required until you can raise on your own terms!) and clear differentiation.
If you want to go full-business-evaluation, I would be more worried about someone else implementing same thing with more commission (imo 95% and first to market is good enough).
Because they don’t have that much initial money in their pocket, while the idle computer is already there, and the biggest friction point is convincing people to install some software. Both producing rhetoric and software are several order of magnitude cheaper than to directly own and maintain a large fleet of hardware with high guarantee of getting the electrical stable input in a safe place to store them.
Assuming that getting large chunk of initial investment is just a formality is out of touch with 99% of people reality out there, when it’s actually the biggest friction point in any socio-economical endeavour.
It is too good to be true. When you see it is making more than a claude code subscription for fuck all work per day.
Prolly gonna make $50 a year tops.
> These are estimates only. We do not guarantee any specific utilization or earnings. Actual earnings depend on network demand, model popularity, your provider reputation score, and how many other providers are serving the same model.
Others are reporting low demand, eg.: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47789171
The numbers are obviously high, because if this takes off then the price for inference will also drop. But I still think it’s a solid economic model that benefits low income countries the most. In Ukraine, for example, I know people who live on $200/month. A couple Mac Minis could feed a family in many places.
As a business owner, I can think of multiple reasons why a decentralized network is better for me as a business than relying on a hyperscaler inference provider. 1. No dependency on a BigTech provider who can cut me off or change prices at any time. I’m willing to pay a premium for that. 2. I get a residential IP proxy network built-in. AI scrapers pay big money for that. 3. No censorship. 4. Lower latency if inference nodes are located close to me.
"You could see a single robotaxi being worth, or providing, about $30,000 of gross profit per year. ... A Tesla is an appreciating asset..."
- Elon Musk during Tesla's Autonomy Day in April 2019.
If you start buying minis, then you need to house, power, and cool them. So you are building a mini data center. If you are building a small data center, economies of scale will drive you to want to build larger and larger. However, this gets expensive and neighbors tend to not like data centers (for good reason). To me this seems like asymmetric warfare against hyper-scalers.