Why Give Your Computer a Second Job? This AI Startup Wants Your Spare Cycles!

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Well now, Fortune tells us a curious tale: a certain firm is pouring nearly fifty million dollars into a sprightly new outfit called Nous Research—an AI venture galloping fast toward a billion-dollar valuation, no less.

These folks aren’t looking to cozy up to the usual AI titans, no sir. They’re plotting a sly little rebellion, crafting open-source language models with a twist so wild it’d set any old data center afire: decentralized computing power, gathered like stray horses scattered across the plains of the internet. Instead of one big barn, it’s a thousand smaller pens—your computer’s idle moments put to work, all across the globe.

Karan Malhotra, co-founder and partner in this digital rodeo, once rode horses with someone from the founding crew at OpenAI. Now he’s telling Fortune that cryptocurrency incentives will be the sheriff keeping folks in line—beckoning them with payoffs for lending their machines a hand.

“It ain’t charity,” he says. “It’s a fair trade. You help, you get your due.” Like swapping apples for oranges, only your apples are CPU cycles and your oranges some digital coin.

They’re building this wild experiment on Solana’s blockchain—though much remains as secret as a hitchhiker’s destination. When the show starts, or even what kind of rewards you’ll get—whether in SOL dust or some other shiny token—that’s all hush-hush for now.

For the moment, it’s all about the groundwork, laying the rails for what they imagine as a fairer, more democratic engine of AI. Who knows? Maybe the future is running on your laptop while you’re off making coffee. ☕🤖

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2025-04-28 08:51