alt Hacker NewsThe 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.
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Isn't this same premise as "lets buy few GPUs to mine crypto and have passive income"? It didn't work very well and it probably won't work now either. If there is money to be made, bigger players will get in there, buy out all mac minis they can, drive price up for regular people and inevitably drive inference price down so you'll be lucky to get initial investment back
On the latency point - your requests are still going through the coordinator of the system here. So on average strictly worse than a large provider.
You - Darkbloom - Operator - Darkbloom - you, vs
You - Provider - you
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On the censorship point - this is an interesting risk surface for operators. If people are drawn my decentralized model provisioning for its lax censorship, I'm pretty sure they're using it to generate things that I don't want to be liable for.
If anything, I could imagine dumber and stricter brand-safety style censorship on operator machines.
It's quite funny thinking about a chimpanzee seeing a lot of bananas thinking this could feed my family and then same with humans only with Mac Minis
How many of those people who could live off $200USD/month can afford or already have a mac mini in the house?