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  1. Will Sutton

Thoughts on L402

PreviousThoughts on SaylorNextL-Apps & Building

Last updated 8 months ago

Cross-posted from

Will Sutton - June 21, 2023

First, LightningAPI's for AI services is the definitive answer to the objection "What can you even buy with bitcoin?" Similar to SilkRoad days, the main thing people will want sats for, is things you can only buy with sats. And since OpenAI, Microsoft et al. will be pressured by their compliance departments, the most powerful and most creative uses will be open source, but difficult to run for the average users (software skills, access to hardware), thus lightning-AI.A couple of overlooked ideas in the thesis for serving models:

  • EC2 for GPUs - Generative AI artists have highly variable demand for image generation: sometimes they want access to multiple GPU's at once to generate a bunch of different draft images or render frames in a video, and sometimes they are doing just touch-up and paying for full use of even 1 GPU is overkill. Existing services (or self-service) will not allow you to both pay-per-use and scale up to multiple processing units on-demand.

  • This brings up another intriguing idea...the AirBNB GPU strategy, buy to fulfill your own need but also to rent spare capacity. This strategy was mentioned yesterday by GeoHot for his new AI server which have "FLOPcoin" apparently. (See video below)

  • Etsy for Models - Currently there's not a great way to monetize a fine tuned model, if you check out civit.ai people are uploading their stable diffusion models simply for clout. With a strong financial incentive, this could supercharge this space, and give the most succeful fine tuners ways to invest into more serious training runs.

Maybe most exciting for the average StackerNews reader is potential for the much awaited bitcoin circular economy: Artists use sats to pay for gpu cycles, gpu suppliers use these sats to buy more servers/models/gpus, and Artists use the images they create to collect more sats from fans/customers. None of these participants even have to like bitcoin, just recognize it's the mana that ties this decentralized ecosystem together.

stacker.news