You don't have to run the AI stuff on the same computer running Krita. At home I have my gaming PC set up for that for the whole family. And if I recall correctly the plugin also promotes a specific cloud service, but you can enter any URL to a compatible service.

The thing is that AI Horde relies on donated hardware. There are only so many people willing to donate relative to people who want to use.

Vast.ai lets people rent hardware, but not on a per-operation basis. That's cheaper then buying and keeping it idle a lot of the time, reduces costs, but it's still gonna have idle time.

I think what would be better is some kind of service that can sell compute time on a per-invocation basis. Most of the "AI generation services" do thus, but they also entail that you use their software.

So, it's expensive to upload models to a card, and you don't want tonnage to re-upload a model for each run. But hash the model and remember what the last thing run on the card is. If someone queues a run with the same model again, just use the existing uploaded model.

Don't run the whole Stable Diffusion or whatever package on the cloud machine.

That makes the service agnostic to the software involved. Like, you can run whatever version of whatever LLM software you want and use whatever models. It makes the admin-side work relatively light. It makes sure that the costs get covered, but people aren't having to pay to buy hardware that's idle a lot of the time.

Might be that some service like that already exists, but if so, I'm not aware of it.

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