If you own an at-home server, a gaming computer, or just a laptop that doesn’t get much love, listen up. You can now put that spare computing power to use and earn some passive income in the process. AI companies are hungry for more compute to run AI inference—the process of using a pretrained model to respond to queries—and they’re willing to pay you for it.
“Imagine Uber or Airbnb, but for AI-inference computing tasks,” says Ilman Shazhaev, founder and CEO of Far Labs, based in Abu Dhabi.
The AI boom has spurred on the construction of massive data centers, often damaging local communities by raising electricity prices, straining local water resources, causing environmental damage and noise, and being just plain ugly. Huge data centers are likely not going anywhere—training new frontier models and running AI models from leading companies will likely still be the purview of these behemoths. But now, several companies are providing AI inference on smaller, mostly open-source models. They are running inference on the preexisting computing power spread throughout homes and small businesses, and compensating the owners.
“Everyone thinks the only way to do it is data centers. And data centers are extractive for the communities in which they’re built, and they don’t return services or taxes or much of anything to the people there. ” says John Federico , founder and CEO of Evolving Edge , in Austin, Texas. “The compute power is out there.
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