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Darkbloom – Private inference on idle Macs

darkbloom.dev

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Re: Darkbloom – Private inference on idle Macs

#151

Post by eigengajesh »

kennywinker wrote: post #8

I have a hard time believing their numbers. If you can pay off a mac mini in 2-4 months, and make $1-2k profit every month after that, why wouldn’t their business model just be buying mac minis?

The numbers are optimistically legit -- it's calculated based purely considering we have demand for all machines at all times. We don't have that right now, but fairly optimistic that people will do it.

That's why we don't recommend purchasing a new machine. Existing machine is no cost for you to run this.

Electricity is one cost, but it will get paid off from every request it receives. Electricity is only deducted when you run an inference. If you have any questions, DM me @gajesh on Twitter.

Re: Darkbloom – Private inference on idle Macs

#153

Post by vrockdub »

saagarjha wrote: post #81
dinobones wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn't someone just uhh... patch their macOS/kernel, mock these things out, then behold, you can now access all the data? If it's not running fully end to end in some secure enclave, then it's always just a best effort thing. Good marketing though.

Yes. Running attested workloads on macOS if you are not Apple is nontrivial.

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Re: Darkbloom – Private inference on idle Macs

#155

Post by Saline9515 »

chaoz_ wrote: post #16
kennywinker wrote: post #8

I have a hard time believing their numbers. If you can pay off a mac mini in 2-4 months, and make $1-2k profit every month after that, why wouldn’t their business model just be buying mac minis?

Solid q. I think the part of it is that it’s really easy to attract some “mass” (capital) of users, as there are definitely quite a few of idle Macs in the world. Non-VC play (not required until you can raise on your own terms!) and clear differentiation. If you want to go full-business-evaluation, I would be more worried about someone else implementing same thing with more commission (imo 95% and first to market is…

Eigenlayer (which this is spun off from) is a massively VC-funded crypto company.

Re: Darkbloom – Private inference on idle Macs

#157

Post by stavros »

eigengajesh wrote: post #151
kennywinker wrote: post #8

I have a hard time believing their numbers. If you can pay off a mac mini in 2-4 months, and make $1-2k profit every month after that, why wouldn’t their business model just be buying mac minis?

The numbers are optimistically legit -- it's calculated based purely considering we have demand for all machines at all times. We don't have that right now, but fairly optimistic that people will do it. That's why we don't recommend purchasing a new machine. Existing machine is no cost for you to run this. Electricity is one cost, but it will get paid off from every request it receives. Electricity is only deducted w…

You're not taking into account the thermal strain on the machine, though. A machine that's 100% utilized (even worse if it's in bursts) will last less than an idle machine.

Re: Darkbloom – Private inference on idle Macs

#158

Post by rjmunro »

lostmsu wrote: post #142
lxglv wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Darkbloom – Private inference on idle Macs

#159

Post by tnchr »

thatxliner wrote: post #70
tgma wrote: post #50

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.

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 orig…

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