Darkbloom – Private inference on idle Macs

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.

And then there's a hit for overprovisioning in general. If the network is not overprovisioned somewhat, customers won't be able to get requests handled when they want, and they'll flee. But the more overprovisioned it is, the worse it is for compute seller earnings.

I suspect an optimistic view of earnings from a platform like this would be something like 1/8 utilization on a model like Gemma 4. Their calculator estimates my m4 pro mini could earn about $24/month at 3 hours/day on that model. That seems plausible.

Assuming that getting large chunk of initial investment is just a formality is out of touch with 99% of people reality out there, when it’s actually the biggest friction point in any socio-economical endeavour.

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 good enough).

Prolly gonna make $50 a year tops.

A H200 gives you ~4 PFLOPs, which is ~60x at only ~40x price (assuming you can get a Mac Mini at $1000). (Not to mention, BTW, RTX PRO 6000 is ~7x price for ~40x more FLOPs).

Your M4 Mac Mini only has ~20 TFLOPs.

As a business owner, I can think of multiple reasons why a decentralized network is better for me as a business than relying on a hyperscaler inference provider. 1. No dependency on a BigTech provider who can cut me off or change prices at any time. I’m willing to pay a premium for that. 2. I get a residential IP proxy network built-in. AI scrapers pay big money for that. 3. No censorship. 4. Lower latency if inference nodes are located close to me.

Others are reporting low demand, eg.: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47789171

- Elon Musk during Tesla's Autonomy Day in April 2019.

Also they’ve already launched a crypto token, which is a terrible sign.

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...

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

That said, their privacy posture at the cornerstone of their claims is snake oil and has gaping holes in it, so I still wouldn't trust it, but it's worth being accurate about how exactly they're messing up.

Even moreso, not for pennies/month

macOS has a strong enough security architecture that something like Darkbloom would have at least some credibility if there was a way to remotely attest a Mac's boot sequence and TCC configuration combined with key-to-DR binding. The OS sandbox can keep apps properly separated if the kernel is correct and unhacked. And Apple's systems are full of mitigations and roadblocks to simple exploitation. Would it be as good as a consumer SGX enclave? Not architecturally, but the usability is higher.

And more so in particular, anyone using Darkbloom with commercial intents should only really send non-sensitive data (no tokens, customer data, ...) I'd say only classification tasks, imagine generation, etc.

Macs have secure enclaves.

I'd say it's not worth it. But the idea is cool.

For Gemma 4 26B their math is:

single_tok/s = (307 GB/s / 4 GB) * 0.60 = 46.0 tok/s

batched_tok/s = 46.0 * 10 * 0.9 = 414.4 tok/s

tok/hr = 414.4 * 3600 = 1,492,020

revenue/hr = (1,492,020 / 1M) * $0.200000 = $0.2984

I have no idea if that is a good estimate of how much an M5 Pro can generate - but that’s what it says on their site.

They do a bit of a sneaky thing with power calculation: they subtract 12Ws of idle power, because they are assuming your machine is idling 24/7, so the only cost is the extra 18W they estimate you’ll use doing inference. Idk about you, but i do turn my machine off when i am not using it.

This seems high. At which quantization? Using LM Studio or something else?

Note: Darkbloom seems to run everything on Q8 MLX.

I figured since I already used it a lot, and I've never had a GPU fail on me, it would be fine.

The fans on it died in a month of constant use, replacing them was more money than what I made on mining.

I don’t think this is a sustainable business model. For example, Cubbit tried to build decentralised storage, but I backed out because better alternatives now exist, and hardware continues to improve and become cheaper over time.

Your electricity and ownership are going to get lower return and does not actually requce CO2.

I’d imagine 1 year of heavy usage would somehow affect its quality.

This is short bursts of heat 5-10 m during the render I would not be happy with that for multiple hours a day. I am sure that would have a negative effect on battery health.

Too expensive. It's probably producing 200 watts average for 8 hours a day. That's 1600 watt hours, which is about $1.60 at PG&E prices. That would take 187 days to recoup the cost of just the panel.

If you include installation costs and "what PG&E steals if you wire it to the same grid" it's probably more like 4x that, which is too long.

Tell me when we can have 400 watt solar panels for $50. Stupid capitalism literally forces solar panel prices to make it unprofitable.

People should never have to take out loans for solar. Solar should be subsidized and forced by the government to be so cheap that it repays for its cost within a month. Then we're talking. Most things I buy to save money, I expect them to repay within a month. Maybe 2 months max.

I added Python execution support via Pyodide (cpython compiled to wasm) and worked on a bunch of other random stuff like WebLLM inferencing during my time there.

Apart from Distributive, there's also the "Golem network", "Salad", "Koii" and various other similar projects.

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I'm not sure if I'm convinced by the "Uber for compute" use case with compute buyers and compute workers (sellers), but if you're a university and you have 1000 Windows machines across all your computer labs, it'd be nice to leverage that compute for running research or something idk - especially with the price of ram / cloud offerings these days...

Remember, all encryption is E2EE if you're not picky about the ends.

Heh, what did they win exactly? This is just a way for another company to extract value out of the single region of the world where Apple is a relevant vendor, and it happens to be the one where it's the easiest to pull people into schemes.

Because they were already at the finish line with Apple Silicon.

> I don’t see a reason not to use this API. The only thing that comes to me is data privacy concerns.

The whole inference is end-to-end encrypted so none of the nodes can see the prompts or the messages.

> Apple’s attestation servers will only generate the FreshnessCode for a genuine device that checks in via APNs. A software-only adversary cannot forge the MDA certificate chain (Assumption 3). Com- bined with SIP enforcement (preventing binary replace- ment) and Secure Boot (preventing bootloader tampering), this provides strong evidence that the signing key resides in genuine Apple hardware.

NVidia data center GPUs have a similar path, but not their consumer ones. Not sure about the NVidia Spark.

It's possible AMD Strix Halo can do this, but unlikely for any other PC based GPU environments.

Tired: That is not a technology problem. It is a marketplace problem.

Wired: This is a marketplace problem, not a technology problem.

But the real solution is to do this other thing. If you'd like I can give you the three-step guide to fixing the thing you asked me to fix.

/s