We used to give our cycles for free to help probing the universe and understanding the building blocks of life
Nowadays it's about selling them to assholes ruining the world.
Well, kinda glad it ends up not profitable enough for them.
this post was submitted on 01 Nov 2026
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I used to give mine for the search for extra terrestrials
Yeah!! I was hooked up to SETI for years!
Man, sometimes watching the visualisations was better than using the computer.
Also, watching the disk defrag.
….how did it take me 35 years to question if I had autism?
Both of those things were perfectly normal.
That is one of the operating modes of someone with Autism.
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Everyone does this!
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I’m the only person who does this!
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Is SETI gone?
Not really, they work on analysing data which people produced over the years. But they stopped SETI@home project.
What do you mean "used to"? BOINC still runs on my machine.
I did folding@home at the time I could have minded bitcoin for pizza. TBH no regrets, fuck crypto I feel better
Still crunching for Einstein@home on few hosts :)
Alphafold was definitely a better era for intentional AI use, assuming that's the kind of thing you mean.
Was folding@home at idk 16 on ps3 Linux (did it require ps3 Linux?).
Sadly, I was just one more outsid otherwise-idle ps3. Luckily, Wall Street has also been devoting all their dollars, ever since then, on .. checks notes.. Uber/Amazon/fracking/shitcoins/AI-race-to-hopeful-monopolization
We’ll run our own models and it will be glorious. We’ll also solve our own problems, like proteins mis-folding, and those leeches on Wall Street, they’ll just keep slowing the rest of us down.
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I love how we went from 1. AI will make your computer obsolete to 2. rent out your computer to AI to 3. sorry, AI doesn’t pay enough to rent your computer. That’s an entire tech boom and bust cycle squeezed into one Mac’s idle time.
Unfortunately in addition, they took all the money for like three tech booms and slammed it all into that one cycle because the US economy was very stagnant and it seemed like their only move that made line go up. Whole thing has been exhausting.
I'm tired, boss.
With the amount of debt (new money) they've created out of thin air, I imagine inflation over the next 5 years will be similar to the last 5 years.
Price drop caused in majority by open weight models. No wonder Altman wants regulations against open models and to take everybody's home computer's RAM.
People running local models would RUIN their profit margins.
And nVidia is now selling hardware for local models specifically. For cheap.
There is a clear winner in the AI race and its hardware makers. To me, its almost like Jensen Huang calculated this outcome quitea while ago, and fed into the bubble with the loans to the software companies.
During a gold rush, you want to be the guy selling shovels.
You do, however Nvidia got greedy and started to circular invest in the billions if not trillions into those buying the shovels. Now, when the bubble bursts, Nvidia will be hit massively as well.
Eh somewhat. I think they were careful enough to just have the loans not actually be in their name if you follow it as deeply as Ed Zitron has. But Nvidia is screwed from a different angle as they've set up expectations of selling more GPUs to data center builders each quarter in order to justify their share price.
That's still much better than holding the actual bag though.
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That's the best way to describe this.
Which hardware is for running local models that is cheap? I was not looking at GPU market for around two years, because I thought everything got expensive through the roof.
Nothing consumer grade - I'm talking about nVidia DGX.
$6k for the cheapest might seem expensive to a lot of people, but for an engineer with stupid amounts of data and a 1.2kW power draw, it's insanely affordable from corporate perspectives.
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They don't have profit margins though
This is the logical endgame IMO so I get why the losers are fighting it.
They can only afford to buy the worlds compute for so long though.
The world at large is nothing like us here on lemmy. Few people even have a PC, let alone interest in local models.
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Honestly, if these shit heads hadn't inflated RAM prices with their speculative datacenter building, I could probably afford to run a quantized GLM-5.3 on local hardware right now
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A global distributed AI network using currently unused local RAM, should put Altman’s concerns about efficiently to bed. I’m sure he’s absolutely delighted.
I think they are just subsidizing to gain users before the IPO though, no?
That‘s my guess too. Anthropic‘s business model was abysmal already but now the IPO looks like a really bad Ponzi scheme that is guaranteed to lose your money.
You mean subsidizing even harder - there have been absolutely no technological advances that would allow for a price drop of 77%, especially with inflation calculated in. This is the equivalent of your crack dealer giving you 4 times the drugs for your money to ensure you and your whole community get hooked.
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This only can mean that they do not actually need more compute for the current situation, while subsidizing their prices hard on top of that fact. If compute were scarce, prices would hold up or rise at least with the inflation rate. Compare this to the amount of datacenters being built, see the discrepancy, realize that at least 200 billion dollars worth of GPUs are just sitting in warehouses doing nothing outside of losing value, and realize that this bubble will crash harder than any of the previous ones. The Dot-Com crash will look like peanuts compared to this.
Edit: This also means the NeoClouds like CoreWeave are doomed. They have no way to pay back the debt they have taken on if noone is interested in renting compute. (I would even go as far as to say that they are doomed either way. I have the hypothesis that this is intended - when CoreWeave goes inevitably bankrupt, NVidia will snag up as much as possible of their own inventory back for a discount, so they can sell it off a second time.)
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Isn't that bad for the big US AI companies? The only thing they are doing that actually makes money is selling their inference service on their private models and they need to make a much larger profit on it to even start paying off the interest on the debt they have accrued on infrastructure and training costs.
This is in my opinion why there is all the scare mongering to try and lock out open weight competition to prevent decoupling inference from the models being run. Otherwise inference just becomes a low margin utility service and the big tech companies that have bet big on AI lose big.
Yes, it is. Their costs aren't going down, only what they can charge and they struggle to be profitable already now. Their only hope is outlawing open models from frontier applications and coding.
My heart bleeds for the precious little pricks. Go get fucked like everybody else without a remotely viable business model.
Confusing headline/article. Darkbloom does not serve proprietary models. It is competitive for smaller models. best price for qwen 3.8 27b.
The actual competition problem is from deepseek which has open sourced its inference server architecture on Nvidia (and Huawei) datacenter cards, and deepseek v4.1 flash is one of the best combos of good, fast, cheap. But it needs a mac ultra for q4, and datacenters much faster/cheaper with batch service. Qwen 4 is coming out next week with 2 good models that fit under 128gb.
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Cheaper Tokens is a good thing. Maybe not for people who want to sell them to you, but if you buy them, that is awesome
This can't possibly be acceptable from a privacy perspective
Edit: Was wrong. They actually have a plausible privacy story. Inference happens in the local machine's Trusted Execution Environment. https://www.eigenlabs.org/blog/project-darkbloom-unlocking-idle-compute-for-ai/
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I really like the idea of home users renting out compute.
(But I don't like that only being specialized scam-connected compute.)
If you like distributed compute that isn't running a scam, you should check out https://boinc.berkeley.edu/
Also folding at home. I basically figure you're donating your power consumption costs to science. I don't know that there will ever be a way to make that profitable to the user renting their computer, considering power costs.
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I wish we could boinc. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
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Are the users' sessions visible to the owner of the rented compute?
I can't see how it wouldn't be. I mean, there's unlikely to be a built-in UI to see them as they come in, but a computer owner that knows what they're doing could certainly see it.
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