this post was submitted on 01 Nov 2026
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Firm that lets you rent out your idle Mac for AI inference workloads warns of plummeting token costs — Darkbloom network sees earnings drop to $1.23 a day as Anthropic tokens fall 77%. (www.tomshardware.com)
submitted 21 hours ago by eicker@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] humanspiral@lemmy.ca 3 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] Diurnambule@jlai.lu 1 points 41 minutes ago* (last edited 41 minutes ago)

Qwen 4 next week ? Got info on this ? I just managed to make glm 5.3 flash run on my system.

[–] 0x0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago) (1 children)

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/

[–] ozymandias117@lemmy.world 1 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

There's no way that's possible

My reading of this is the TEE is used to validate the binary hasn't been tampered with, but the TEE is definitely not powerful enough to do any inference.

The provider process is hardened against common local inspection paths, including debugger attachment and external memory inspection. The integrity of the running binary is also part of the trust model, helping ensure that the software serving requests matches what the network expects.

The system also uses hardware-backed attestation rooted in Apple’s security architecture. Secure Enclave keys, attestation signals, and recurring challenge-response checks are used to verify that a participating node is running with the expected protections and software state.

[–] 0x0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

I haven't fact-checked this, but the TEE could protect GPU memory in addition to main memory. Apple attests that the correct binary is running in the TEE, et voila.

[–] ozymandias117@lemmy.world 1 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago) (1 children)

Attesting is very different from protecting

The binary performing the inference isn't running in the TEE, because the TEE runs on a weaker processor. The TEE is validating that the binary running on the main processors hasn't been tampered with

That's decent, but doesn't match the statement that inference is happening in the TEE

[–] 0x0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

I think the phrase "running in the TEE" is the idiomatic way to describe a program running on the main CPU, attested by the TEE processor, and protected/isolated from other processes on the system (modulo exploits, lol). I'm vaguely familiar with AMD's SEV-SNP, mainly from reading security papers rather than any hands-on experience. I make no claims about Apple's Secure Enclave, though.

[–] ozymandias117@lemmy.world 1 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

I very much disagree with

think the phrase "running in the TEE" is the idiomatic way to describe a program running on the main CPU

In the Confidentiality/Integrity/Availability triangle, a secondary process running in another operating system gives you integrity, but not confidentiality

[–] jivandabeast@lemmy.browntown.dev 1 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

You both should just read the docs

https://docs.darkbloom.dev/security/overview

They lay out all the protections they have in place to ensure private prompt execution. The TEE is used to validate the integrity of the binary, and they use other protections like E2EE, SEV-SNP on the coordinator, MacOS security protections (hardened runtime, SIP, kernel protections, etc), plus (from what i can tell an optional enrollment from providers) in Apple's MDM which makes Apple verify the integrity of the system.

[–] ozymandias117@lemmy.world 1 points 2 hours ago

That's literally what I said, and why I disagreed with the other poster saying it ran in the TEE

Whether the protections of the main binary are sufficient I've made no comment on

[–] xxce2AAb@feddit.dk 12 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago)

My heart bleeds for the precious little pricks. Go get fucked like everybody else without a remotely viable business model.

[–] brsrklf@jlai.lu 218 points 20 hours ago (6 children)

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.

[–] skittle07crusher@sh.itjust.works 7 points 10 hours ago

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.

[–] visch@quokk.au 22 points 15 hours ago

I did folding@home at the time I could have minded bitcoin for pizza. TBH no regrets, fuck crypto I feel better

[–] mx_smith@lemmy.world 63 points 19 hours ago (3 children)

I used to give mine for the search for extra terrestrials

[–] Speculater@lemmy.world 37 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

Yeah!! I was hooked up to SETI for years!

[–] DScratch@sh.itjust.works 24 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

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?

[–] shalafi@lemmy.world 4 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

Both of those things were perfectly normal.

[–] DScratch@sh.itjust.works 3 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

That is one of the operating modes of someone with Autism.

  1. Everyone does this!

  2. I’m the only person who does this!

[–] shalafi@lemmy.world 1 points 6 hours ago (2 children)

What is? The suspicion that one is the only one that does a thing? That would explain why everyone around here says they're autistic. Never seen that on any other platform and I'm really interested in why.

[–] DScratch@sh.itjust.works 1 points 5 hours ago

The world works in more absolute terms for the autistic brain.

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[–] belochka@lemmy.world 5 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago) (1 children)

I really like the idea of home users renting out compute.

(But I don't like that only being specialized scam-connected compute.)

[–] empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.com 14 points 10 hours ago (3 children)

If you like distributed compute that isn't running a scam, you should check out https://boinc.berkeley.edu/

[–] belochka@lemmy.world 2 points 4 hours ago

Already

[–] ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca 4 points 6 hours ago

I wish we could boinc. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

[–] Joelk111@lemmy.world 7 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 8 hours ago

There are some crypto projects attached to boinc and f@h, like Gridcoin, that provide rewards for compute power. They are very much an added on layer that isn't really worth much in real world dollars though.

[–] Flower@sh.itjust.works 79 points 19 hours ago (2 children)

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.

[–] meme_historian@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

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

[–] refract@lemmy.zip 1 points 1 hour ago

That's a lot of VRAM! What would be your dream build in that scenario?

[–] lepinkainen@lemmy.world 28 points 18 hours ago (5 children)

People running local models would RUIN their profit margins.

[–] shalafi@lemmy.world 2 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

What profit margins? :)

Seriously though, home AI is never going to compete. Few people have PCs in their home any longer and only a tiny subset of those users will fiddle with local models. I'd like to, but I don't have the compute. :(

[–] lepinkainen@lemmy.world 8 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

If hardware prices weren’t insane, we would have prosumer level turnkey home AI already.

Now it’s just for hobbyists with too much money.

[–] shalafi@lemmy.world 2 points 7 hours ago

And I don't see that changing. :( And in no case are loads of people going to get into local AI. Lotta nerds around here, but Joe on the street barely knows what AI is, and he certainly doesn't have a PC any longer.

[–] peopleproblems@lemmy.world 27 points 16 hours ago (2 children)

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.

[–] paraproto@szmer.info 4 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] peopleproblems@lemmy.world 3 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] meme_historian@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

Depending on what you're looking at, a Mac Studio might be the most bang for your buck. They have much higher memory bandwidth than the DGX Spark

[–] peopleproblems@lemmy.world 1 points 2 hours ago

I'd have to look way more into it, but from what we were looking at, DGX spark is made with the intent of scaling from local development to datacenter execution. From memory the Mac Studio was an extremely beefy workstation.

Both serve the purpose better than whatever my laptop's RTX ADA 2000 can produce lol

[–] tburkhol@lemmy.world 24 points 16 hours ago (5 children)

During a gold rush, you want to be the guy selling shovels.

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[–] eicker@lemmy.world 91 points 21 hours ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] Wildmimic@anarchist.nexus 22 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago) (1 children)

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.)

[–] shalafi@lemmy.world 2 points 9 hours ago

Yep. Tired of the dotcom comparison. That was a 1,000 pound bomb. This crash will be a nuclear detonation.

[–] myyass@lemmy.world 1 points 8 hours ago

FAFO?

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