ai and ml

Blame plunging prices on tokens

Declining token prices have prompted Darkbloom, a distributed inference network, to reassess its business plans.

Darkbloom , a project from Seattle-based tech biz Eigen Labs, has developed software that allows anyone with a sufficiently capable macOS device to rent their GPU through the Darkbloom network for interference jobs. In return, they get paid.

Through this network, 800 or so participants – including as of two days ago this reporter – have been able to collect a few cents to a few dollars per day by having their hardware handle AI model prompts submitted through OpenRouter , an AI model gateway.

In theory, someone running one of Apple's recently released Mac minis with an M5 Pro chip and 64 GB of RAM could earn as much as $192 per month handling incoming inference jobs, per the company's estimate.

That assumes full 24/7 utilization during this period on a sought-after model like Qwen3.6 35B A3B, which sells for $0.065/M input tokens, $0.75/M output…