Up to $200 a month renting out your Mac to AI: two months later, the dream collapses

This summer, renting your Mac with artificial intelligence held the promise of a nice extra income. The company behind the project is now warning its participants: the gains are meager, and they will not increase soon.

Launched in April by the American company Eigen Labs, Darkbloom offers Apple Silicon Mac owners the opportunity to put their machine's graphics processor at the service of AI models, for a fee. Requests come in through OpenRouter, a gateway that routes developer requests to different model providers, and the Mac owner pockets the entire calculation. In August, Eigen Labs put this income at between $120 and $200 per month on average, an estimate that French testers questioned, while one of its own researchers lowered the estimates further this week in a message to participants.

In his message, researcher Kydo celebrates the milestone of a thousand billion tokens processed by the network, these fragments of text which serve as a unit of account for the AI, before admitting that “the gains were small”. “For most suppliers, I don’t expect it to recover anytime soon,” he adds.

The network has around 800 participants, who collect anywhere from a few cents to a few dollars per day. At the top of the ranking, the median of the top 50 reaches $5.26 per day, or almost $160 per month. Eigen Labs estimates the maximum earnings from a 64 GB Mac mini M5 Pro at $192 per month, provided it runs at full speed day and night on a high-demand model.

The price of tokens has reportedly fallen by 54% since May, and Kydo points to data centers, which have become much cheaper to run: “Production per Nvidia cluster has increased by around 20 this year, and their margins are wide enough to lower prices by 90% while remaining profitable at 50%.” Darkbloom, which promised AI half the price of major suppliers, has lost this advantage: “The market has caught up with our price,” summarizes the researcher. Lowering prices further remains possible, he acknowledges, but most participants would then receive even less.

OpenRouter would also give more weight to the response speed and the degree of compression of the models than to their price to distribute requests. For Macs without a Max or Ultra chip, Kydo warns that inference "won't be worth running."

At the regulated rate, the kilowatt hour costs around 20 cents in the Base option. A Mac mini M4 Pro, whose consumption can rise to 140 watts, therefore spends around 2.8 cents per hour of intensive computing, or 67 cents per day if it is running at full speed without interruption. Darkbloom itself estimates a cost of 1 to 3 cents per hour for electricity for an Apple Silicon Mac.

At full charge, the Mac mini M5 Pro used as an example by Eigen Labs would earn at best 27 cents per hour, much more than the electricity costs of a comparable machine. With gains of a few cents to a few dollars per day, most of the Macs on the network run very far from this regime. Either their owners do not leave them there permanently, or there are no requests: in both cases, the electricity bill remains modest, but so does the income.

Machine-translated from French