This is part of a series of markets about things I could do in 2024. See also: /Mira/which-of-mira-s-cool-ideas-will-mir

Summary

Tired of spinning up expensive GPU VMs to handle your erratic AI model usage? Upload your model(LLM, image generation, etc.), deposit $20, and use a standard API endpoint as little or as often as you like without worrying about scaling VMs up/down.

There is a minimal charge for storage, but mostly you pay per token or per generation.

If you upload a model that others use, you can keep 70% of the API profits paid out to your Stripe account. So, if you finetune a fancy new language model, you can sell exclusive access to it on our site, or upload it for free on HuggingFace as usual and use my site as a way for people to easily test it without setting anything up. You keep full rights to your models by default.

Do you play around with a lot of AI art or language models? Sign up for a subscription and get unlimited use(for ordinary or even heavy human users, but not exploitative) of any model on the site.

Do you have a custom model for business use? (Manifold might have a lora for the Manifold logo or Mana-chan integrated into every market banner) Upload it to our site and use it just like standard OpenAI APIs. A complicated ComfyUI workflow could also be turned into an API, if there was sufficient demand.

Points against

• This is kind of an obvious idea. Everybody everywhere knows how to wrap a model in an API. While nobody has this exact pay-per-use scheme with custom models( I checked https://airtable.com/appdROzVqLVH3K1NP/shreLdrTqHNgcR4n0/tblwZmslxCJBaYyXr/viwEkeyBtQU9SzS6S ), it's the kind of thing that somebody could clone as a feature for their model-hosting service.

• If the models are public(and even if not, there are enough public models out there), somebody could scrape them all, clone my API, buy Google Ads redirecting everyone to their site instead of mine, and steal all the attention and get more funding and name recognition.

• The kinds of people that hesitate to spin up an expensive GPU server are probably cheap customers. Mid-sized companies might also be interested, but they would also be willing to have their infrastructure people manage a fleet of servers.

Market Mechanics

Trigger condition: Deploying any application website to a domain name. Planning, writing prototype code, a static placeholder website, etc. will not be sufficient as minimal effort for this market.

Resolves NA if the trigger condition is not met. Otherwise, resolves to the logarithmic interpolation between nearest bounding answers(or to $1 if I start this but don't make any positive profit for the entire year). Units are "profit in USD". I'll add new options at multiples of 10 as needed before resolving.

Example: I make $500 in annual profit. The nearest options are $100 and $1000. Then this market resolves (ln(500) - ln(100)) / (ln(1000) - ln(100)) = 70% $1000 and 30% 100.

"Profit" is income minus expenses. I'll have to calculate expenses for my taxes, so e.g. OpEx will count 100% as an expense, CapEx will probably be weighted 20%. A salary to myself would count as an expense. Equity doesn't count as income.