Hacker News Reader

Comment by tgma | Hacker News Reader

I installed this so you don't have to. It did feel a bit quirky and not super polished. Fails to download the image model. The audio/tts model fails to load.

In 15 minutes of serving Gemma, I got precisely zero actual inference requests, and a bunch of health checks and two attestations.

At the moment they don't have enough sustained demand to justify the earning estimates.

View on HN

They released this like a day ago, I'm not surprised that there's not enough demand right now. Give it some time to take off

You'd think to bootstrap a marketplace you'd spend your own money to feed fake requests (or perhaps allow free chat so that they induce requests).

Still, absolute zero is an unacceptable number. Had this running for more than an hour.

I kind of see your point, but I also kind of don't.

Sure, it would be great if you'd immediately get hammered with hundreds of requests and start make money quickly. It would also be great if it was a bit more transparent, and you could see more stats (what counts as "idle"? Is my machine currently eligible to serve models?). But it's still very new, I'd say give it some time and let's see how it goes.

If you have it running and you get zero requests, it uses close to zero power above what your computer uses anyway. It doesn't cost you anything to have it running, and if you get requests, you make money. Seems like an easy decision to me.

Well I already made the Ctrl+C decision. Yours may have been different, but I suppose only one of us installed it, and that one counts.

Copy?

SIGINT

I went with the ctrl z approach.

Hopefully you also set it running in the background.

Bootstrapping will be near-impossible (or incredibly costly) unless they offer inference consumers models with established demand arriving at some least-cost router service where they can undercut the competition (if they actually can). And then dogfood the opportunistic provider side on their own Macs, but with a preference to putting third parties first in the queue. Everything else is just wishful thinking.

> We're not taking funds from customers yet — we're personally paying for all the provider requests during this phase. Credit purchases are disabled.

This appears on their credit purchase page right now, but you have to email them to get credits (everyone starts with zero)

Has anyone tested the system from the other end... sending a prompt and getting a response?

weird to learn that they do not generate inference requests to their network themselves to motivate early adopters at least to host their inference software

If they paid promised > $1k/m for FLUX 2B on a Mac they would go broke in less than a month. On a single 5090 that model would provide an inference througput so high they'd have to pay close to $50k/m for the results.

The numbers are absolute fraud. You shouldn't be installing their software cause fraud could be not just about numbers.

Can you rephrase that? I don't think I've read it correctly. It sounds like you are saying it would normally cost $50k on a 5090 and they can do equivalent work paying $1k. That's sounds like a $49k profit margin, but you say they will go broke.

I'm assuming it's meant the other way around.

Given their estimates of a Mac being able to generate $1k (per month?) a 5090 with a lot more power would be able to generate $50k. For a $3k piece of hardware. Which is obviously not realistic. (As in, nobody is paying that much for the images, which seems to match well with no actual requests on the system.)

and I don't think they ever will unless they're highly competitive (hopefully that price they have stays? at least for users)

I was thinking of building this exact thing a year ago but my main stopper was economics: it would never make sense for someone to use the API, thus nobody can make money off of zero demand.

I guess we just have to look at how Uber and Airbnb bootstrapped themselves. Another issue with my original idea was that it was for compute in general, when the main, best use-case, is long(er)-running software like AI training (but I guess inference is long running enough).

But there already exist software out there that lets you rent out your GPU so...

People underestimate how efficient cost/token is for beefy GPUs if you are able to batch. Unlikely for one off consumer unit to be able to compete long term.

What's a good place to do this?

For Windows there's https://borg.games/setup (I'm the author).

How much revenue to users actually see?

You can see in their stats view they have a lot of providers/nodes connected but practically no actual demand/consumers. They just launched and I'm sure get providers was top of their agenda, but it's essentially unusable as a provider unless they perform some serious lift to get actual paying customers.

Any news after 10 days here? Did anyone successfully tried either side of this?

I received the same error, but it was followed by this line in the logs, which might explain the lack of inference requests assume there is actual demand...

WARN STT backend failed health check — model will NOT be advertised

I disabled the audio model (had to remove it, it was so buggy) and then started up with a text only model. Serving started without error. The system simply has no requests. The economics seem like a mirage anyway.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com