[zabhi]

Why would an average user want to participate in such a network? The only reasons I can think of are tied to benevolence and altruism of the participants. We saw this being successful in the SETI project. I doubt paying participants would ever be profitable enough for either the operator (why not rent a few machines over cloud) or the participants (training would need power and cpu).

How about tying the training and consumption of the model together. An internet scale tool with a focused goal, like Alexa/Mycroft for speech and intention recognition, that trains a distributed model while pushing improvements back might be more successful in getting adoption.

[0-_-0]

Lots of people have machines sitting idle that they could rent for neural network training as long as the money they receive is more than the cost of electricity. Cloud computing is significantly more expensive than just the cost of electricity.

[driscoll42]

This project will probably be more successful if it can tie into BOINC, which grew out of SETI@Home, and has several hundred thousand computers working on various projects. It'll be a lot easier to get people already donating time/resources to donate to this than starting from the ground up.

But you are right about the why? I admit I personally do Folding@Home most of the time, because EVGA gives you up to $10 to spend at EVGA a month by participating, or Boardgamegeek gives badges and some currency to to spent on their site. Which in EVGAs case, has made it so I basically only buy EVGA products now as I have a bunch of EVGA bucks to spend there.

[Grimm1]

I mean https://minecraftathome.com/minecrafthome/ is a thing that people do so I kind of expect people will do this as well.

And tons of people participate on Folding@home which also uses GPU these days.