Your gaming GPU could earn you money: Microsoft patent explained
Your graphics card spends most of its life doing nothing. You paid a small fortune for it, you play for a few hours, and then it sits there with its fans idle until tomorrow. Microsoft has noticed. A patent published on 5 November, titled “Opportunistic Micro-training on Edge Devices Using Spare GPU Utilization”, describes a system that borrows that idle silicon to train AI models. And the owners could get paid for it.
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How it would work
Training a big model requires racks of GPUs in a data center. This patent suggests breaking up that process into tiny tasks and distributing them among gamers' PCs, laptops, and other consumer devices, depending on how much computing time each device is able to give.
The whole process monitors the use of the GPU, memory consumption, temperature, and energy consumption of the computer. In case the card is overheated and you are playing at the moment, it checks less frequently. If the computer is cool and inactive, it checks more often and gives tasks to do. Imagine a tenant using your kitchen while you are sleeping.
Where the money comes in
Microsoft would not build their own models using your rig. This is because of the patent where Microsoft sees itself as a middleman connecting third parties that do not have computing power and people with excess computing power. It is completely voluntary and some of the incentives include credits that can be exchanged for money and access to AI models or software.
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But here comes the tricky part. There is nothing in the patent about any payment structure. There are no rates, no amounts at which you would be paid, and even no launch date.
Why it makes sense
The problem is that AI labs lack GPUs, and the problem drives GPU prices up constantly. The idle GPUs of millions of consumer devices might appear to be a free resource pool. Not a novel approach too; startups such as Exo Labs have attempted to combine spare GPUs into clusters, but they lacked what Microsoft had - enough Windows users to pull this off.
Industry giants still have their eyes on the hardware left idle by you. Sam Altman recently found himself under fire from the Internet due to his statement that spare memory of PC users would help AI develop better. Gamers are sensitive about that.
Why you might say no
Will you give up your card? Increased load requires significant power consumption, and sometimes a couple of credits may not be enough for additional power consumption from your bill. In India, where even an adequate gaming video card already costs quite a lot per month out of your paycheck, then maths can go wrong pretty quickly. Add heating, noise from the fan, and the wear of components that are not easy to replace.
Then comes the question of security since Microsoft will be involved in each task. Windows 11 users do not particularly enjoy the inclusion of AI everywhere, so this issue is much more important than any technical one. As of now, it is only a patent, and Microsoft has not confirmed its intentions to implement it.