Bonsai Swarm launches: run a 27B model in your browser and trade idle GPU for AI Coins
airesearch12 · x · 2026-09-18
Bonsai Swarm is now live: an open-source, free, non-crypto P2P GPU-sharing network, with the first crowd GPUs online.
- How it runs: the Ternary Bonsai 2 27B model (5.9 GB, ternary-quantized) executes in-browser via WebGPU in a Web Worker — no install, no API key, no server farm; it keeps working while the tab sits in the background.
- The economy: share your GPU at night, use everyone else's by day. You earn AI Coins for online time and tokens actually generated; chatting spends them. Balance can never go negative.
- Requirements: providing needs ≥12 GB VRAM (16 GB comfortable; Apple Silicon ≥24 GB unified memory works) and a real in-browser benchmark at 10 tokens/s. An 8 GB RTX 4060 laptop measured only 2.5 tokens/s — chat-only. The trick is time zones: your machine is idle while someone 12 hours away is awake and asking.
- Sharing means strangers' prompts run on your machine — the project is upfront about this.
Related event: Open-Source Bonsai Swarm Lets Browsers Share GPUs to Run 27B Models(3 posts)→
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