How many of those people who could live off $200USD/month can afford or already have a mac mini in the house?

They already have an iPhone. They could save up or borrow for a Mac Mini if they had to. Some of those people I know who live on $200/month have $30k in the bank.

then you are talking about low spend, not low income

Not really. There are lots of people who have low income and low spending, but not low savings. Retired pensioners with savings. Young families who inherited from deceased parents/grandparents. Highly paid professionals on sabbatical. I've met people from all of those categories in Ukraine who live on $200/month.

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.

I'm not talking about Darkbloom specifically, but rather this business model in general. I'm sure a future version of Darkbloom could be P2P for better latency. Or their central operator nodes could be geo-balanced. Liability for censorship doesn't matter if it's truly zero trust. Anyway censorship is not my main concern. Low-latency decentralized inference with no US BigTech dependency is a much bigger selling point in Europe.

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

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

No it's not the same premise at all. Crypto doesn't do anything useful for legitimate businesses. AI inference is very useful for legitimate businesses, and so are residential IP proxies for scraping. And by definition, residential IPs cannot be centralized. And as building GPUs becomes more expensive, the existing pool of second hand unused hardware becomes more valuable, not less. The problem with crypto mining is that it quickly becomes unprofitable for small scale deployments. I'm not sure if AI inference would be, especially for the decentralized benefits of lower latency.

It is the same premise, because the person you are responding to is not talking about the moral implications at all, only about the financial / hardware implications.

Running AI inference increases the power draw, and requires certain hardware.

Mining bitcoin increases the power draw, and requires certain hardware.

OP's point thus stands: Bad players will find places to get far cheaper power than the intended audience, and will buy dedicated hardware, at which point the money you can earn to do this will soon drop below the costs for power (for folks like you and me).

Maybe that won't happen, but why won't that happen?

The main problem with crypto is there is no universal need for it. The demand for crypto doesn’t keep increasing as compute gets cheaper. But the demand for AI inference is only growing, and making it cheaper would likely only increase demand. So it’s not a race to the bottom. Sure hyper focused players can earn more at higher margins. But average players can probably still earn decently. Take for example electricity. It can still be profitable for a home in Germany to install balcony solar and make a little money selling back to the grid even though it’s obviously not as efficient as an industrial power plant. Mom and pop AI inference don’t have to be super efficient as long as they serve a universal need - it will be like balcony solar in Europe.

The residential IP proxy point is i think invalidated by their privacy model. I think they aren’t offering up your IP, just your GPU.