If someone wants to process sensitive data and is okay with 10x slowdown, it's better to use offloading. This is another, slower method for running large LMs locally without high-end GPUs, see details here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34216213

In other words, if Petals nodes became 10-100x slower, Petals would lose its competitive advantage over simpler methods that don't communicate over the Internet.