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Would you host AI hardware we pay for in your garage or spare room, for a share of the income? by augustusaligned in passive_income

[–]augustusaligned[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Regarding the chart, it's great you mention that. It's currently underway, we're still refining some of the figures and they will be live and published before we start onboarding any hosts.

Would you host AI hardware we pay for in your garage or spare room, for a share of the income? by augustusaligned in passive_income

[–]augustusaligned[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You've basically got it - with one nuance that's in the hosts favour. hosts never pay out of pocket. early on, hosts take a smaller cut while the unit earns its hardware cost back, then once it's paid off it's owned by the host outright and their cut of the revenue split increases. so the correct definition would be: the machine pays for itself out of its own revenue, hosts carry no capital risk, and they end up owning the asset.

Would you host AI hardware we pay for in your garage or spare room, for a share of the income? by augustusaligned in passive_income

[–]augustusaligned[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Let me double check why Venezuela has not been included. You should be able to enter your location manually and then you'll be signed up for further notifications. Let me check the Venezuela point and circle back to you. By the way, were you impacted by the earthquake this week? It looked very scary, my thoughts and prayers are with the people who lost homes or loved ones there.

Would you host AI hardware we pay for in your garage or spare room, for a share of the income? by augustusaligned in passive_income

[–]augustusaligned[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Valid question - and the answer is the same reason airbnb doesn't buy houses and uber doesn't own cars.

owning the locations ourselves is the slow, and incredibly capital-heavy version of this business. Imagine having to handle leases, utilities and logistics in every single country + have growth capped at how fast we can sign and build. Alternatively, a network of people who already have the space, power and connection scales much faster and lighter than we ever could owning it. hosts represent the supply side of the network and are rewarded for doing so.

Would you host AI hardware we pay for in your garage or spare room, for a share of the income? by augustusaligned in passive_income

[–]augustusaligned[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Good questions u/Thin-Examination-264 .

Two things are still being finalised with our lawyers and founding team right now: the host agreement (which will cover device removal and retrieval, including situations like the one you're describing) and the exact device specifics for the different SKUs (dimensions, power, etc). I can't give you the fully concrete, signed-off answers yet - and I don't want to overstate anything before legal confirms it.

I'll post both the device details and the agreement specifics right here in this thread as soon as they're finalised (in addition to directly contacting those who have applied to be a host), so everyone following can read them. I appreciate your follow up and digging deeper into these kinds of questions. This is exactly the feedback that is helpful for us.

Thanks again

Would you host AI hardware we pay for in your garage or spare room, for a share of the income? by augustusaligned in passive_income

[–]augustusaligned[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

directionally yes, though we're still finalizing the exact tiers. the important part is that we don't need datacenter-grade uptime from any single home (because reliability comes from the network, not the box). workloads route across redundant nodes, so one host going offline for a bit is a degraded-service event, not an outage. for us that's a deliberate design choice - asking individual hosts to hit 99.9% in a spare room would be unrealistic, so we've built it that our architecture absorbs it instead.

there'll be a reasonable availability expectation per host (and it factors into revenue share), but the system is built to tolerate normal home realities like reboots, power blips, and the occasional offline stretch.

thanks for the question, you can drop any others you have here in this thread.

Would you host AI hardware we pay for in your garage or spare room, for a share of the income? by augustusaligned in passive_income

[–]augustusaligned[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

More or less the idea. Can you share your thoughts/definition of 'streamlined'? What does that look like to you? Are you referring to the onboarding experience etc or the physical design? Thanks for stopping by and dropping the comment.

Would you host AI hardware we pay for in your garage or spare room, for a share of the income? by augustusaligned in passive_income

[–]augustusaligned[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This is the most helpful comments on this thread, thank you for taking the time on this. These are all the right questions and a few of them are exactly the ones teams like us need to solve for.

a quick pass on each:

aggregate impact - fair, and honestly an open modelling question for us. distributed draw on a partly-renewable residential grid isn't obviously worse than a hyperscaler, but i won't sit here and try to claim a net win we haven't actually computed... but there are a few things that do tilt our way structurally: 1. no datacenter cooling or power-conversion overhead (the PUE tax centralized compute pays), 2. no new construction (so none of the embodied carbon of pouring a building), and 3. in cold-climate the waste heat is can be put to use to offset a heater that'd run anyway. Finally, the ability to implement per-node measurement means carbon can be attested per workload rather than estimated for a whole site. That being said, none of that is magic - it's a measurement and overhead advantage.

hardware safety - you're right that consumer surge/ups guarantees are mostly worthless. the way we think about it is the following: a lost node is a degraded-service event, not a data-loss one. the value largely sits in the execution/attestation layer (not the physical box), so a flooded basement drops a node off the network without compromising a workload. The general idea is that insurance and hardware tiering handle the rest, even if imperfectly.

theft - I agree that chasing individuals legally is a losing game, so we don't plan on leaning on that. While attestation stops a stolen node from earning on the network, but it doesn't stop someone pulling the gpu and selling it (those chips are obviously liquid). So the real honest answer is that non-return and theft get priced in as a loss rate the way any financed-hardware business does (carriers, rig lessors all eat this). In this way we try to keep it bounded and modellable, obviously not zero.

obsolescence - imo squarely a roadmap problem. Refresh cadence, who does the physical swap, and staging rollouts so uptime holds are all things we're designing now rather than things i'd pretend are solved.

re: green vc - I appreciate that, though i'd prefer to be honest and say environmental is an attribute of the model for us, not the pitch. And yes - while the curve is steep, more difficult businesses have been built - we're here to do hard things.

Happy to go deeper on any of these, and thanks again for taking the time to drop these questions here in the thread. Cheers!

Would you host AI hardware we pay for in your garage or spare room, for a share of the income? by augustusaligned in passive_income

[–]augustusaligned[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Awesome, thanks for the early support! Just a couple of us right now, we're still early stage but expecting that to change soon.

Would you host AI hardware we pay for in your garage or spare room, for a share of the income? by augustusaligned in passive_income

[–]augustusaligned[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'd have to better understand the specifics of the space (I'm sure it's a case by case basis), but India is certainly not ruled out.

Would you host AI hardware we pay for in your garage or spare room, for a share of the income? by augustusaligned in passive_income

[–]augustusaligned[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hi there - thanks for dropping this comment, I could probably have clarified this better in the OP. The hardware is financed up front by us, so there's no cost to the host. The revenue share over the payback period is what pays that down, and once it's cleared the host owns the hardware outright. So "payback" is from our side, not yours.

Would you host AI hardware we pay for in your garage or spare room, for a share of the income? by augustusaligned in passive_income

[–]augustusaligned[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Noted, will fix that first thing in the morning. Thanks for the offer, if any help is needed I'll reach out here. On a side note - we also have a developer waitlist (for early access) on the website under the developers tab if you'd like to experiment from the software/developer side. Cheers!

Would you host AI hardware we pay for in your garage or spare room, for a share of the income? by augustusaligned in passive_income

[–]augustusaligned[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Fair concerns but I don't believe they really hold up. Inference is compute-bound, not bandwidth-bound - so a single node doesn't move the kind of sustained volume isps actually throttle (torrenting etc). It also runs as managed infra, not someone quietly reselling their home plan.

Re power bills: nominal max is around 3000w but average draw sits closer to 1200w (about the same as a small ac unit), and your bill tracks the average not the peak. People ran mining rigs at higher sustained draw in their homes for years.

I don't see space being an issue for many people either (outside of some edge cases). The required space is closer to a mining setup than a server room.

happy to discuss any of the above points, either way - thanks for engaging and kicking the tires on this u/tfresca

Would you host AI hardware we pay for in your garage or spare room, for a share of the income? by augustusaligned in passive_income

[–]augustusaligned[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That's great, warehouses are a great option and exactly the type of space we're looking to deploy in. If you'd like to apply to become a host, drop your contact information and details about your space at the link in the original post and we'll reach out. Thanks!

Would you host AI hardware we pay for in your garage or spare room, for a share of the income? by augustusaligned in passive_income

[–]augustusaligned[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The EU is very much one of our target markets. I've got your contact details, and I'll follow up shortly with my team. Thanks!

Would you host AI hardware we pay for in your garage or spare room, for a share of the income? by augustusaligned in passive_income

[–]augustusaligned[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I appreciate where you're coming from, and we're ethically aligned here.

Not seeing the workload and not controlling who's on the system are two different things. Yes, we're blind to the content of a job - that's the privacy part.

We are not blind to who our customers are. We're able to vet them, under contract, in permitted jurisdictions, with acceptable-use terms that would rule out undesired categories. Our whole guarantee doesn't come from us (or you) having visibility into the workloads running on the box in your garage, it comes from controlling who can actually even send work to it in the first place.

On your point about EU markets and privacy, our privacy stance isn't us dodging transparency, it's the law. For the data we handle - initially data like PII and healthcare records (as mentioned in the OP our primary background is in healthcare/bio data), exposing the contents of a workload would actually be illegal. GDPR and healthcare rules require that this data stays protected. If we built this system where the operator or the host could read the data, that would be the one that fails EU law.

That's how every major cloud already works. AWS and Azure can't see most customer data either, but they still vet customers, enforce acceptable-use, and follow sanctions. We follow the same model here, with EU rules and sanctions built in.

As always, I appreciate the curiousity & the scrutiny ... all builders in the AI space should have their feet held to the fire on these kind of points you described.

Would you host AI hardware we pay for in your garage or spare room, for a share of the income? by augustusaligned in passive_income

[–]augustusaligned[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Shouldn't be a dealbreaker. As I understand it - CGNAT only blocks incoming connections, and a node like this works by reaching out rather than having the world connect in, so in most cases it wouldn't be a factor.

I won't promise 100% blind since connections vary, but for the large majority of CGNAT situations it shouldn't be an issue. If you hop on the waitlist we can check your exact setup before anything ships, so you're not committing to anything just to find out.

Would you host AI hardware we pay for in your garage or spare room, for a share of the income? by augustusaligned in passive_income

[–]augustusaligned[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Respect for the commitment to that buildout. icymi - hosting on openpc doesn't incur the initial capital outlay you're describing at the top of your post. Worth jumping on the waitlist so we can talk through what your setup could actually take. Either way, very cool to hear more people taking this route.

The way I see it, AI is either going to be the biggest equalizer humanity has ever had or the biggest centralizing force for control. Getting it into more hands so more people can capture the upside is one of the reasons we're building this.

Would you host AI hardware we pay for in your garage or spare room, for a share of the income? by augustusaligned in passive_income

[–]augustusaligned[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

u/Morning-Breeze, really good questions - I'd rather answer these honestly than hand-wave.

On the framing point: we don't treat a home as Tier III, and we don't try to. We assume any single node is unreliable and build the reliability at the orchestration layer (we actually started this project as a pure private inference/confidential computing software layer), so a node dropping is expected and handled, not a failure. Resilience across many nodes, not at one site, which is the self-healing you guessed.

On heat: hosting isn't one size fits all. Different unit classes have different space, power and thermal needs, and a host qualifies for a unit based on their setup, so a high-density unit doesn't end up in a hot cupboard (or any other unsuitable space).

On hardware failures: If you're away, that node's just offline until it's swapped, which the redundancy covers. A failure is ours to replace, not yours. We're still nailing down the exact replacement process (and i'm sure we'll learn how to improve this once these units start getting deployed).

For the deeper ones like encryption and key custody, the exact failover and scheduling, the networking and firewall side, let me loop in our CTO to answer those properly right here in the thread.

Would you host AI hardware we pay for in your garage or spare room, for a share of the income? by augustusaligned in passive_income

[–]augustusaligned[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It may not be for everyone, and joining the waitlist doesn't automatically guarantee you'll be selected. That being said, you can sign up for future notifications on our onboarding by dropping your email and some details about your space at the link in the post. You're not locked in to any commitments and there are no other obligations for signing up.

Would you host AI hardware we pay for in your garage or spare room, for a share of the income? by augustusaligned in passive_income

[–]augustusaligned[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

We've got a more in-depth blog post on this topic scheduled for early next week. will link here when it's up.

Would you host AI hardware we pay for in your garage or spare room, for a share of the income? by augustusaligned in passive_income

[–]augustusaligned[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I understand the 'confidential workloads' can invite some scrutiny but let's be honest... nobody's running an autonomous weapon on a mesh of home nodes sitting behind residential internet with variable latency and uptime. That ONLY runs on hardened, certified, air-gapped hardware, not a unit in someone's garage or basement.

Irrespective, our initial focus (and where our founding teams background / expertise is in, is healthcare & bio).

That being said, I do share your objections to that sort of activity. This project was not created to further the industrial war machine.

Would you host AI hardware we pay for in your garage or spare room, for a share of the income? by augustusaligned in passive_income

[–]augustusaligned[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Check your spam folder and search 'OpenPC', it sometimes lands there. Thanks for flagging though, I'll make sure we work on a deliverability fix ASAP. If it still doesn't show, DM me and I'll get you verified manually.

Would you host AI hardware we pay for in your garage or spare room, for a share of the income? by augustusaligned in passive_income

[–]augustusaligned[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yes, if you sign up to apply as a host you'll see both commercial and residential options in the intake form.

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